


Almost Certainly by scarredsodeep

by scarredsodeep



Category: AFI
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crimes & Criminals, Detective Noir, M/M, Mystery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-15
Updated: 2012-08-15
Packaged: 2018-03-05 00:00:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 13
Words: 63,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3097442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarredsodeep/pseuds/scarredsodeep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jade Puget is a hard-bitten detective from the pages of a pulp novel out to convict wealthy playboy Adam Carson, who is almost certainly guilty of his mother's murder. His case only lacks one thing: evidence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Murder Most Foul

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello and welcome, everyone!
> 
> I have been working on this idea for a while--I have no idea how to write a crime story, absolutely none--and will do my best to update it weekly! 
> 
> This story was born from me imagining Hunter saying the word 'dame' and loving it. I don't own the members of AFI, and though this story is entirely fictional, they have generously lent their names to it.
> 
> Thanks for reading!

The lights on the arbors blazed, sparkling silver on dark leaves. The warm cheerful glow of paper lanterns gleamed above the guests’ heads, and the whole of the garden was bathed in light. The warm August air held just enough of a chill to raise goosebumps on the ladies’ bare arms, to make them shiver with the promise of September. Neat, suited waiters danced expertly through the crowd, silver trays refilling themselves with flutes of champagne as if by magic, never ceasing their bright flashing long enough for a human hand to pour.

Less agile than the waiters, Adam Carson bobbed along with the current rather than gliding effortlessly through; guests caught his eye or elbow and he flitted between compliments and courtesies with a winning smile and his trademark charisma, both polished to a high sheen. Everyone agreed: the gardens were lovely, enchanting. What a night for it! The sky so clear, the stars so merry. It was the finest benefit of the season. However _did_ they grow the anemones so large? No one had ever heard of a worthier cause. And the Monet hanging in the foyer—what a thing of beauty! _Where_ had it come from—who had he convinced to loan it out for the evening? What important and generous friends! What impressive guests.

Each toast emptied another champagne flute and Adam’s head spun fantastically with the warmth and pleasure of the evening. His smile grew wider, the cobbles pushing off against his feet, propelling him along, tugging at gravity. He paused to catch his breath at the fountain and watch the dancers, whirling between hedge-walls of roses and the solemn string quartet.

“Looking dashing as ever, Mr. Carson,” purred a voice from beside him. A particularly comely heiress hovered glowingly at his side, running her long fingers through the fountain’s spray and positively bursting out of her plunging evening gown. As leggy blondes tended to be, she was a welcome sight. Adam flashed a wolfish grin and swept her hand from the fountain, pressing his lips to its misty back. Though he recognized her décolletage, he could not quite remember her name. That meant she was a plate-only; he’d learnt the names and faces of every donor, to the point that he could give heartfelt thanks for their generosity, garnished with personalized anecdotes for each, in his sleep. This soured the flirtation, but only a little. Adam Carson was a lot of things, wastrel heir to his father’s fortune first and foremost, but he hadn’t organized this fundraiser for the benefit of his social life. As he’d told the journalists earlier this evening, the new state-of-the-art children’s hospital was of personal importance to him. It wasn’t just a _cause_ , he’d told them charmingly. Saving the lives of children was a personal _mission_.

Although, he reasoned, brightening, if this particular heiress’ family had fallen on hard times and her inheritance had dwindled to a commanding surname and florid list of acquaintances, she’d be an eager, desperate lay—wouldn’t have paid the plate price if she wasn’t husband-hunting. The thought cheered him considerably and, pulling her out onto the dance floor, he allowed himself to feel especially debonair. It was his party, after all.

 

 

An hour and one purloined bottle of champagne found them in one of the sixteen manor bedrooms—the green and gold one with the gilt lion heads worked into the fireplace, Adam’s favorite—tangled together behind the musty bed hangings. The heiress’ hair tumbled loose about her shoulders, diamond choker discarded in favor of Adam’s lips on her throat. For his part, Adam’s shirt and bowtie flopped open, tux jacket discarded unceremoniously. The heiress’ lovely long fingers were worrying at his cummerbund, her dress long ago slipped off her fine shoulders, baring milk-white breasts, when the scream shattered their murmuring laughter. It had come from down the hall. Adam and the heiress sprung apart. She wriggled back into her sleeves as Adam threw open the door and took off running towards the blood-curdling sound.

Downstairs, the kitchens bustled with activity, and the foyer and coat closet were warm and well-lit. But the other rooms of the great house were closed, dark, and meant to be empty; the ballroom, from where the scream had come, was presided over by dust-covered clusters of disused furniture, the mirrored walls covered with sheets and the two-story windows shuttered. It hadn’t been aired out, let alone used, since his father had died. The doors ought to have been locked, his mother and the head butler the only ones with keys—it should have been impenetrable to stray guests.

Shirt buttoned badly as he’d run and bared skin smeared indecorously with lipstick, Adam burst into the ballroom, double doors cracked open as if awaiting his arrival. On the dusty floor in the center of the room, a crumpled figure lay terribly still in a dark, spreading puddle.

Adam fell to his knees before he reached it, recognizing within five paces the black lace, the rope of opals, the severe silver chignon. It was his mother.

She was dead.

 

* * *

 

Davey was in the kitchen, fruitlessly trying to wring gossip out of the tight-lipped staff, when he heard the scream. Without a moment’s hesitation—with finely honed journalist’s instincts he prided himself on—he snatched up his camera and took off at a dead run. His first thought was that he couldn’t believe his luck. The second was about headlines. His first byline—he’d want it to be eye-catching. Stick him in _Society_ , would they? Send a serious journalist to photograph a garden party, would they? David Marchand was no mere quote-mongerer. He was going to blow his editor out of the _water_.

His finger was on the shutter before he was even in the room. He’d taken the staff staircase up from the kitchens and found the third door on the left side of the narrow corridor still swinging. The first thing his flash caught was a badly disheveled Adam Carson, the prince of the castle himself, kneeling over what seemed to be a body, eyes wild and hands wet with blood. His second shot captured Wynn Wednesday, _Society_ darling, former _fortunata_ and princess of the hoi polloi, holding up the top of her dress and screaming. The third was a close-up of the victim. Rogue clung to her powdery white cheeks, the only color left in them. Her famously periwinkle eyes were open and glazed by terror and death. Her throat was brutally slashed open. Blood was everywhere; the murder weapon was nowhere in sight. _Ding dong_ , Davey had thought to himself. _The witch is dead_. It was better than a fairy tale: it was his career on a silver platter.

In the aftermath of three blinding flashes, the room was utterly dark. His eyes adjusted more quickly than the others’, protected by the lens. That single detail, he would later report gravely, may have saved his life. Blinded and enraged, the murderer stumbled to his feet and lunged in Davey’s direction. Davey darted out of the way just in time.

“Get away from her!” Adam Carson bellowed, lunging again, less blindly this time. “I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you! You bastard! _Get out of my house_!”

At this point in the story, the detective raised an eyebrow. “Carson threatened to kill you?” he asked, Davey felt, somewhat dubiously.

“If I hadn’t blinded him with the flash, he may have killed me next,” Davey answered smartly. “If you’re satisfied, Detective, I’ve got to get this to my editors before the other papers get ahold of it. This story is a—a career-maker. You understand.”

For a moment, the detective looked nonplussed. Then he creased his brow with his hand, sighing wearily. His eyes were bloodshot, Davey observed keenly. He wondered if this had pulled the detective out of bed. It was going to be all over the papers, likely the first page—Eliza Carson murdered, and he with an inside scoop. He felt literally buzzing with energy.

“Mr. Marchand,” the detective said at last, “while I’m sure the _Chronicle_ appreciates your zeal, the photographs you took tonight are all evidence in this case.”

Davey’s heart dropped through his stomach. “What does that mean?” he asked weakly.

“We’ll be keeping them is what it means. Maybe the boys in the lab will be giving you copies and maybe they won’t—and you certainly won’t be publishing them anytime soon. Speaking of which,” and at this the detective fixed him with an exceptionally piercing stare, “the camera you gave forensics didn’t have a memory card in it. I’ll need that card, Mr. Marchand.”

Davey opened and closed his mouth several times before he managed to emit a shrill protest. “You can’t,” he squeaked. “I’m an American citizen. There are—rights—the story of a _lifetime_ …”

“What you are, Mr. Marchand, is a suspect in a _murder_ investigation, one who’s flirting with obstruction of justice charges. So let me tell you right now it is in your best interest to cooperate fully.”

Davey’s heart dropped the rest of the way, now fluttering somewhere in the vicinity of his ankles, and he squeezed the SD card in his pocket compulsively. _Suspect_?  
He said the first thing that popped into his stunned head. It was, perhaps unwisely, “Warrant”.

“Excuse me?” asked the detective, leaning forward and narrowing his flashing eyes.

Davey took a deep breath and spoke more loudly. “Don’t you need a warrant? To search my belongings?”

“Why did you take the memory card from the camera in the first place, Mr. Marchand? What exactly are you trying to hide?”

“If you aren’t going to charge me with anything,” Davey said with a calm he did not possess, “I believe I’m free to go.”

The detective snapped the folder in front of him shut in a surprisingly violent motion. “Fine,” he said scathingly, pushing himself back from the table in apparent disgust. “Go. You’ll want to look into getting yourself a lawyer.”

 

* * *

 

Detective Puget stalked through the precinct and back to his desk, far enough from the interrogation rooms to be an affront to his physique. He was still trim at 40, but he hadn’t been exactly faithful to his workout regime and the smoking—well—it’d be the death of him.

He sat down heavily in his desk chair, frustrated with himself for losing his temper with the journalist. These days every witness Puget questioned, seemed like, had seen a few police procedurals on TV and thought he was a defense lawyer. Made a man cranky. It was unlikely the memory card would yield any convicting evidence, or even look much different from their own crime scene photos. And it wasn’t like the kid was even their prime suspect.  
These were excuses but they didn’t excuse him.

What was in it for the kid, Puget wondered? He’d said it himself—the story of a lifetime. But Jade had been 16 years on the job; in his experience, people didn’t slash the throats of elderly philanthropists just so they could write an article about it and draw a lot of attention to the crime. Besides which, he prided himself on his ability to feel people out. Marchand didn’t have it in him to kill somebody, certainly not over a newspaper story. Not in Puget’s opinion.

He’d gotten the kid good and spooked, though. Probably enough to make him run out and do something stupid, like destroy the files or, worse, publish them. Puget sighed. He’d been doing this long enough to know better. Still—no use dwelling on it, was there? Maybe the kid would turn the pictures over meekly once he got his byline, maybe he’d flee to Mexico. It was out of Puget’s hands.

About to come _into_ his hands, though, was a much more delicate interview. He riffled through his file again, preparing himself. Adam James Carson, prime suspect. All versions of the story put him first on the scene of the crime. It was his home, his mother—his money. Or at least it was his now that his mother was out of the way. Carson had approximately 2 billion dollars worth of motive to open up the old lady’s throat.

Not quite 10 years his junior, Carson was 31 years old and lived with his mother. Detective Puget was familiar with the Carson estate, which was quite extensive, but still found that living situation foreboding. Man that age had no business living at home, be home a family manor or the Buckingham Palace. Of course, everything he’d heard about Carson corroborated that he wasn’t a man at all, but an overgrown child’s rich, indiscriminant, wild. A presence at all the right parties and in all the right bedrooms. Entitled trust fund brats all thought they were Bruce Wayne, or Peter Pan. He prepared himself to interrogate a drug-addled, bloody-handed rich man-child, smug and self-assured with his lawyer to protect him and demanding bail, weeping in his cell at night if he didn’t get it.

 _Disappointed_ ’s not the right word, but he didn’t get what he’d expected. Carson was cuffed and still bloody at the table when Puget walked in, looking drunk and bewildered. Someone had buttoned his shirt for him.  
His eyes, Puget noted, were dry. There was a distant, measured look in them until Puget seated himself across the table. Then Carson’s eyes touched onto him and zeroed in. It was not the self-satisfied look Jade had expected. It was a hell of a stare—about nailed him to his chair.

Puget gathered himself, dropping his folder carelessly on the table between them. At this point the folder was essentially a prop. There was very little information of value in Carson’s file. He’d never even been fingerprinted before. This was the moment Marchand’s photo would have been good for. One good shot of himself standing over the body and a certain type of killer would confess. Carson didn’t seem that type, but Puget felt the loss of the photos nonetheless. Coffee was no kind of substitute at all for a night’s sleep in your own bed.

But now was not the time to curse himself for his mishandling of the journalist. He’d just have to take a different tack with this one. He had some pretty grisly photos of the victim in the folder, if he needed them.  
Puget held Carson’s eye contact for just longer than was comfortable before he said, “You’ve just become a very wealthy man, Mr. Carson.”

Jade expected to be stonewalled—after all, no lawyers had arrived yet. Carson, however, shifted in his seat and said, “Do you feel as if you’re in imminent physical danger, Detective?” Carson leaned forward so that the light caught his cold blue eyes, making the idea of violence sink in through Puget’s exposed flesh like ice when it had only been a vague, skin-skimming awareness a moment ago.

“Should I?” Puget asked, showing nothing.

Carson raised his hands above the table and held them out. “The handcuffs,” he said, as if Puget were very slow, “are not necessary. I have been a lamb for you.”

Puget decided he’d play along, whether the sacrificial language made his back prickle or not. Anything he could get out of Carson before the lawyers descended would help them nail this guy. Best not to alienate two suspects in one night. He fished a key ring from his pocket and undid Carson’s cuffs, avoiding contact, and let them fall to the table between them. His heart rate had picked up in an unprofessional manner. He was curious as to how this would unfold in a sense quite removed from his job responsibilities.

Unlike most freshly uncuffed men, Carson didn’t rub his wrists. Instead he stood slowly, carefully nonthreatening, and extended a hand. After a beat Puget realized he was offering a handshake. The detective remained seated.

Carson kept the hand out a moment longer before he dropped it. “Adam Carson,” he said, sitting down again. “Pleasure to meet you.”

It was Puget’s inclination to ignore this too, but the lawyer-clock was counting down. If niceties would get Carson talking, he’d observe them, though he generally made a point not to fraternize with likely sociopaths. Finding Carson’s file deficient, Puget had turned to the man’s Wikipedia page. The man was either utterly useless, innocent, or psychopathically guilty. In Jade’s professional opinion, anyway. He’d have to get a copy of the Hare Checklist from the precinct profiler.

“Detective Jade Puget,” he introduced himself at last. “The pleasure’s all mine.”

Maintaining that peculiar contact with his sharp blue eyes, Carson said, “That’s a beautiful name. Jade.” He moved the name in his mouth like he was tasting it. Jade pretended to be unaffected, though his skin crawled. “How lovely.”

Puget felt himself tiring of the game, and quickly. He was better as Bad Cop. He’d been at home in bed when the call came. He’d been reading and—now that he’d been wrenched away—felt sure that his insomnia had been receding, that he’d been only moments from sleep.

“The only thing keeping you out of prison right now,” Puget said in crisp, carefully measured words, “is the murder weapon.” He let that sink in, hoping to ruffle the man. Carson’s brows flickered, a miniature paroxysm of concern, but that was all he got. “We can’t find it,” he went on conspiratorially. “It’s not in the ballroom. Don’t worry, though. I’m very good.”

“The people of San Francisco are very lucky to have you, I’m sure, Detective Puget,” Carson said dryly. “I’m a little concerned that I seem to be your prime suspect, however. You see—” and here he mimicked Puget’s mockingly confiding tone—“I didn’t kill my mother. But someone did, and they’re out there, Detective, stashing your murder weapon and scrubbing their hands and _getting away_.” The rigidity of the last two words was all that betrayed Carson’s anger. The man was cold. He could easily, Puget recognized, take a life. He was almost certainly their killer.

And yet his outburst planted in Jade a seed of doubt. He’d never interrogated a suspect who hadn’t pled innocent, at least at first. But he sensed a conviction in Carson, a legitimate anger at a murderer escaping punishment. Not the shaded glee of a bloody-handed sociopath at all.

Of course, most people who were capable of committing cold-blooded matricide were also very accomplished liars. Wasn’t that the mark of a good one? Conviction. Believing your own bullshit. That’s how people got away with murder: by the time they were done convincing the jury they were innocent, they believed it too.

“Where were you when your mother died?” the detective asked. The question was as tired as he was. No one ever told the truth.

“With Wynn Wednesday. In a bedroom just down the hall,” Carson replied, a slightly challenging note in his voice that Jade noted with interest. Aggression, possible defensiveness, related to sexual conquests—or perhaps it was a tell.

Puget didn’t need to shuffle through papers for the transcript but did, for effect. He fished a page out of the file with a practiced flourish. “I have Ms. Wednesday’s statement right here, Mr. Carson. She says she was in the ladies’ room freshening up when she heard the victim scream. By herself, Mr. Carson. Of your acquaintance, she says you’ve met a few times at social functions but pursued no further relations. Her statement,” and here Puget watched Carson more intently than ever, hoping he’d give something away, even surprise, “doesn’t say anything at all about bedrooms.”

Carson didn’t look surprised in the least—another tic in the sociopath column. “Of course it doesn’t. She’ll want to keep it out of the press.” His eyes sparkled, saying _Didn’t you think of that? What kind of detective are you?_

Puget had had enough. Carson wasn’t being cooperative, he was being manipulative, clouding objectivity by mongering strong feelings. Jade pushed off from the table, leaving his folder open to the gory crime scene photographs. “Mr. Carson, I’m placing you under arrest for the murder of Mrs. Eliza Carson at approximately 12:45 this morning. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law…”

 

* * *

 

Clients like this were his bread and butter. Assassination plots against shrill, beribboned terriers; cheating husbands; cheating husbands who’d double their wives’ fee if he kept his snapshots to himself. Yessiree, the life he’d made for himself was one of rip-roarin’ excitement and intrigue. Just how the pulp novels of his childhood had made it out to be.

He gave Mrs. Tiny Dog an expert look of professional engagement and concern, which he had refined over the last ten disappointing years as an adultery photographer. He doodled inattentively in his steno book and nodded at irregular intervals. Her impassioned tale of canine woe was utterly wasted on him.

When the phone on his cluttered desk began to ring, he held up one finger and snatched it out of its cradle. Rude of him, but much longer and he’d fall asleep at his desk, which he’d been told before was not altogether flattering to clients.

“Hunter Burgan, PI,” he answered. When he heard what the caller had to say his face lit up like a jack-o-lantern. He had waited ten years for a call like this.

He spun out of his swivel chair and flipped his fedora onto his head in one fluid motion. The broad opened and closed her mouth like a fish out of water, affronted, as he shrugged into his trenchcoat. Today of all days he was damn well going to look the part.

“Where are you going?” she fish-gasped at last. “I haven’t finished telling you—”

“Case solved. If the vet says it was cancer, love, it was cancer. Dear little Boffin was done in by natural causes. Now beat it, lady. You’ll get my bill in the mail.”

He was out the door before she managed to close her mouth.  


End Notes:

(Real Life Jade is almost 40 himself. Craziest damn thing. It seems more and more likely I will still be writing this when he's 80.)

Let me know what you think!

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=8874>  



	2. A Hard Town

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys: more Hunter. I know that's all you're here for. Who cares about slashes, it's all about Hunter. Check in next chapter for EVEN MORE Hunter!

"It’s a hard town. Too hard. Especially with dames like her involved,” he rasped with a voice like gravel. Puget looked the man up and down. Rumpled trenchcoat. Dick Tracy fedora. Dark, stubbled chin and jaw. Light blue-grey eyes that glittered like permafrost. He would not have been surprised if it was a Halloween costume. The man rubbed a hand over his rough jaw before sticking it out at the detective and growling, “Hunter Burgan, private investigator.”

Puget spit his coffee back into the mug before he choked on it. “You’re joking,” he said flatly. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

The PI broke into a smile that was part wince. “Well, yeah,” he said, dropping the Batman voice and doffing his fedora, which he stuffed ceremoniously under his arm. But the disheveled trenchcoat remained, along with the distasteful matter of the man’s profession. “I am a PI, though. Our mutual friend Adam brought me onto the case.” He sounded a little sheepish about it. Puget guessed he’d worked with police before, knew what kind of attitude to expect. PIs were about as welcome in a precinct as the Spanish influenza would be. They got in the way, they compromised evidence, and it was incredibly insulting. Jade had spent years of his life to catching bad guys and putting them away with any charges he could make stick. He didn’t do this for his own amusement, and it certainly wasn’t the salary; he did it to make the streets safer for the people who lived on them, to save lives, to do his civic duty to the goddamn human race. PIs were money-grubbing low-lifes who scammed sweet old ladies and encouraged the public to doubt the effectiveness, dedication, and loyalty of the police force. Puget knew—had worked beside—men who went on to die protecting civilians, real-life heroes. He’d never known a PI to do anything but turn witnesses against them and scare off leads.

Looking increasingly apologetic in the wake of Puget’s scowl, Burgan sighed and said, “I thought I’d at least ask if you’d share information with me. It would make things run more smoothly, you understand, and keep me out of your way. If you give me what you have, I won’t need to go poking into your leads or dogging your footsteps.” Puget’s scowl persisted. Burgan’s brows creased just a little. It was clear he thought he was being reasonable. Hell, he was being reasonable, at least compared to some other PIs Jade had dealt with throughout his career. There was a place for the services of a private investigator—for example, when the police had to mark a case cold because the leads dried up, or when missing persons cases were retired from the milk cartons and nightly news. The police force didn’t have the funding or the manpower to pursue dead ends; it was a great comfort to families to pay hand over fist for the privilege of knowing someone was still searching for their loved one. It kept them for admitting what the police already had: whether or not a body is recovered, most missing persons aren’t missing—they’re dead. But there was only one function of a PI in a murder investigation, and it was getting in the way. Distracting cops from their work. Attracting the press like carrion flies to their stink. Okay—three functions.

“Listen,” Burgan pressed. “ _I_ know you do fine work, and I know that there’s no one better than the SFPD to find the perp and put him behind bars. Maybe Carson’s innocent and maybe he only hired me to look that way in court; doesn’t matter much. He hired me and I’m on the case, like it or not. You can either make life easier for the both of us, or more difficult. It’s your call, Detective.”

Puget could feel his nostrils flaring uncontrollably. Though he’d nearly perfected his emotionless mask, anger still made his nostrils go crazy. He exhaled forcefully, trying in vain to still them. “We don’t share information with the press and we certainly don’t share it with the likes of you. If you bother me or any of my men again, I’ll have you barred from the premises.”

Burgan didn’t look terribly surprised, or even disappointed. “Fair enough. If anything changes your mind, you know who to call.” He held up his card and placed it with exaggerated care onto Jade’s desk, where the detective glared at it hard enough that it might have begun to smoke and curl at the edges. The PI left the room with an obnoxious swirl of his trenchcoat, and Puget tossed the card into the black hole that was his desk drawer. He had no sooner finished the thought that at least the day could only go uphill from here when it immediately took a turn for the worse.

“Got a minute, big brother?”

Expensive suit, polished shoes, crisp haircut and blazingly sincere smile: Smith Puget was the full package. Jade bit off a groan at the appearance of his brother at the top of the stairs. Smith waltzed into the room as if he owned the place, spinning a chair from a junior detective’s desk and dropping himself into it. He had his ankles crossed on Jade’s desk before the chair stopped spinning.

“Thanks for the referral, Detective Puget,” Smith said, grin wide and obnoxious. “What would my career be without you?”

Jade didn’t hate his brother. Not as a person, anyway. Only on principle: Smith was a criminal attorney. Jade busted his ass catching criminals and chasing evidence; Smith seemed to take special pleasure in getting them off the hook. If any other lawyer out there took to personally undermining Puget’s work, to reading the police blotter like it was the classifieds, well, that would be business. Smith was family; things were personal.

“I’m going to have a hard enough time with Carson’s case without you getting involved,” Jade said stiffly, trying not to actually growl. He missed the PI.

Smith rubbed his hands together and laughed. “You do your best work when you’re coming up against me, Jadey. I’m _good_ for you.” Jade showed his teeth and Smith grew incrementally more serious, dropping his feet to the ground—leaving bits of grass and dirt all over Jade’s desk—and leaning forward. “Easy, brother. Just busting your balls a little. I haven’t taken the case yet anyway. I stopped by to see you first.”

Puget’s eyebrows shot skyward. “I _know_ you aren’t here for my blessing,” he said crabbily. “So what the hell are you doing in my office?”

Smith, whose own office was very high up in a very handsome building with all kinds of functioning air conditioning and expensive quartz-topped desks, glanced around the open-plan linoleum-tiled room with the minimum incredulity. Though, to his credit, he did not remark upon it, it was clear that he did not consider Jade’s set-up an office at all. Puget ground his teeth, no longer caring if he was being discreet. Smith laid his hands flat upon Jade’s desk and made a face like what he was about to say was eminently reasonable. Puget felt that he had had enough lunatics speaking to him in a reasonable tone to last a lifetime, just in the last 24 hours.

“I _did_ want to ask if I should take the case,” Smith said. “Maybe not so much your permission, but… Is it worthy of my talents? The press is great, with those bloody photographs and the hoi polloi all bestirred, of course, but it all looks rather open-and-shut to me.”

“You mean he’s guilty,” Jade said.

Smith gave just the slightest smile, as if Jade had said something rather cute. “I mean the opposite. Do you have any damning evidence? From what I’ve gleaned there were 300 people at that party, three people _on the scene_ , and nary a smoking gun to be found. Those charges won’t stick, J. I’m surprised you mustered enough to make an arrest.”

The worst part of what Smith was saying was that it was mostly true. Puget had made the arrest in large part because Carson had annoyed him. About the only leg it had to stand on at the moment was motive. Any self-respecting lawyer—Smith especially—would get him out on bail with no more than a pointed look at the judge.

“I want to be challenged, Jade. I want to know I can _lose_. Keeping shady men out of prison isn’t fun anymore; I want a hands-down, undoubtedly guilty one. I want to come up against forensic evidence and _win_. I want to feel that thrill again. So you tell me: should I take the case?”

It was all Puget could do not to leap across the desk and strangle his brother. He had most likely already taken the case; if he hadn’t, someone else would. Like Smith had said, the press would be incredible. Jade made a mental note to track down a copy of the _Chronicle_ and see what the Marchand kid had decided. If he’d printed the pictures, at least they’d get to see them, with or without a warrant. No, he could guess at Smith’s game: he wanted Jade to tell him that they had jackshit so he could secure bail, so he could laugh the prosecution out of court.

“You should get the hell out of my precinct,” he advised, “and you should read about my evidence in the papers.” Puget got to his feet abruptly, hoping the gesture would make Smith slither away. When his brother made no sign to leave his seat, where he looked quite comfortable, Jade decided he’d leave instead. He could do with some coffee, a bit of fresh air.

“Very well, you win this round,” Smith called after his receding back. “But I’ll have Carson out on bail before you make it to Jamba Juice, so if you have any burning questions I’d ask ‘em now. He might not be here when you get back.”

 

* * *

 

This is a new all-time anxiety high,” Davey muttered to himself, afraid to look around as he climbed the steps as if he might catch a forbidden glimpse of the strings that held it all up. The summons he’d received was curiously brief:

 

_Join me for lunch, 2pm._  
I believe you know the address.  
A.C.

 

The text could have come from anyone; he hadn’t exactly exchanged numbers with Adam Carson when they’d met. He was eighty percent sure it was a prank, and that his snooping around the grounds of the Carson manor would only strengthen the case against him. The whole thing had possibly been orchestrated by the grumpy detective from the night of the murder. He was probably pretty pissed when he saw the front page of the _Chronicle_. Davey had been tiptoeing around—eggshells came to mind—since he’d been questioned brusquely, threatened with criminal charges, and had then gone on to publish the photographs in explicit defiance of police orders. There was another shoe and it was going to plummet to earth any minute now.

So he was feeling a little jumpier than usual as he knocked on the mammoth front door. Of course it was only just this moment occurring to him that Adam Carson didn’t have exclusive rights to the initials A.C. In fact, just off the top of his head several other names came to mind. Names of people who might actually be interested in having lunch with him.

Davey lost his nerve, and what remained of his withered conviction, at the same moment that the great door swung open. He recognized the butler who had opened it—he’d pestered him at the benefit, trying to ferret out a story. The butler showed his quality by feigning ignorance of their previous acquaintance. “Mr. Carson is in the conservatory,” the butler said, politely fixing his eyes on a point just above Davey’s head.

Davey had two thoughts in near simultaneity. First: how was _he_ supposed to know where the conservatory was? Second: did people actually have conservatories? Was that a thing? Or was he correct in assuming that he’d very shortly be murdered by Professor Plum with the candlestick?

But he found his way without incident—it turned out to be as straightforward as ‘follow the butler’—and no candlesticks emerged, and then he was face-to-face with Adam Carson and any other thought fled without hesitation.

Carson was seated at a small iron bistro table topped with a mosaic of a ship at sea. He was, Davey observed faintly, reading the paper. _The_ paper, that is—the _San Francisco Chronicle_ , which for the second day in a row featured a large bloody photograph of his butchered mother, headlined by speculation that he was the killer, photo credits to one David Marchand. Sunlight fell through the great windows that walled the room, cutting across the paper and Carson’s face behind it. Davey swallowed hard and was wondering how to announce himself when the butler took care of it. “May I present Mr. Marchand,” he said without even a hint of feeling.

Carson glanced up from his newspaper and, seeing Davey, folded it crisply. “Thank you, Alonso. When should I expect lunch?”

“Two fifteen sharp,” Alonso said with a small nod of deference, excusing himself from the room. That was class, Davey thought to himself in the split second of impressed luxury before he realized he’d just been left alone in the room with a known murderer who, when they had last met, had not had very favorable things to say to him.

Davey stole a glance at his watch. Seventeen minutes until lunch. That was plenty of time for Carson to hack him into bits with a steak knife. He and Carson stared at each other for a long moment, Davey paralyzed in fright and Carson looking as comfortable as a lizard napping in the sun. At last Carson said, “Please, sit.” Davey more or less fell all over himself in his rush to comply and Carson, very decently, did not so much as snicker.

“Like most of the newspaper-subscribing citizens of the Bay area,” Carson said in a tone Davey didn’t know what to make of, “I’ve recently become quite familiar with your work.” He paused expectantly, but Davey had no idea how to respond, and stayed silent. Talkative though he usually was, it wasn’t difficult—he hadn’t needed to say a word since walking up the front steps. Alonso and Carson had conducted all the necessities.

Carson held up the paper so that Davey was face-to-face with his handiwork—today the less-gory shot that framed Carson and Wednesday in the doorway. “I can’t begin to tell you how pleased I am to know that full-color photos of my mother’s slaughter can be found on seventy percent of San Franciscan doorsteps. Not to mention,” he went on in a tone still utterly unreadable, “bright red and shocking on every newsstand in the city. It’s been quite a comfort to me.”

Carson’s eyes bored into Davey mercilessly. It was impossible to tell if he was expressing real pleasure, real feelings of comfort, or conveying a lurid death threat. His face was a mask, his voice pitch-perfect and expertly controlled. It was becoming obvious that at this point Davey would have to say something. “Seventy percent?” he was mortified to hear himself squeak. “That’s—uh—I had no idea our circulation was so good.”

It was either the wrong or the right thing to say. Davey could not get his bearings in this lovely, sunny conservatory. Carson threw back his head and laughed. Davey chuckled weakly, not sure what else to do. But he seemed to have passed some kind of test because, when Carson finished laughing, he wiped at his eyes with his hand and leaned forward, stabbing the folded newspaper with a finger. “This kind of big, attention-getting thing—this is what I need,” he said. “Only instead of pictures of me covered in blood, I need pictures of me doing innocent things—being licked by puppies, helping old women cross the street, that kind of thing. I need an aggressive positive PR campaign while I’ve still got the nation’s interest and I’m not yet in orange—while I can still garner some sympathy. My mother’s just been brutally murdered, mind you. I’m very torn up about it. And since your pictures have made us both overnight sensations, I thought to myself, who better for the job?”

This speech sounded dangerously close to an admission of guilt to Davey. “I don’t understand,” he said in a strangled voice. Carson smiled his famous smile. “An insider’s look at the Carson murder trial,” Carson said, voice rich with imagined success. “A weekly exclusive detailing the exploits of a murder suspect, by a murder suspect. Meetings with my lawyer, my publicist, my secret dinner dates with Wynn Wednesday—I want you to be there for all of it. I want you to report on all of it. I daresay your editor will go for it. And before you besmirch my integrity,” Carson went on over Davey’s protestation, “of _course_ you will be free to write whatever you choose. I’ll read it for the first time with every other _Chronicle_ subscriber, the morning after it’s printed.”

Davey opened and closed his mouth. What could he say? An offer like this, well. It would sell papers. It would make his name for good. He’d become _the_ journalist of the Carson murder trial, especially if—as Carson had just suggested—he played up the suspect angle himself. Oh, would it _ever_ sell papers. But he hesitated. He didn’t know why.

“You threatened to kill me,” he blurted out. “I could have killed her, couldn’t I? I mean—if you know I’m a suspect—how do you know it wasn’t me?”

Carson just looked at him, but there was enough derision in that look to answer Davey’s question three times over. “It would be better if it was you,” said Carson, “but if you aren’t interested, I know several—”

“No!” Davey yelped, interrupting much more loudly than he’d planned. “No,” he repeated more calmly. “That’s not necessary. I’ll do it.”

Carson’s grin spread wide across his face and Davey wondered what he’d gotten himself into.

 

* * *

 

Adam walked through the halls of his house like a ghost. This evening he felt pale, grey, ethereal—cool and intangible. Like nothing could stick to him. The hot bite of brandy burned through him briefly and faded; that too slipped right off, barely grazing him.

He kept the lights off, for the most part, when such a mood took him. Tonight he felt particularly brooding and would have liked to drift through the ballroom, float over the scene of the crime, feel that too slide off his shoulders. But the path to the ballroom was lined with can lights, the room itself lit by the impossible wattage of a flood light. The great doors were webbed with police tape and a uniform stood guard before them at all hours. Carson’s new lawyer was trying to speed the process along and get the police out of the house; it was due solely to his handiwork Adam was permitted to stay in his own home at all. For the time being, the police line tape and the uniform remained. Adam had been making friends with the men and women staking out his home while forensics decided if they needed to scrape up even more of the parquet. In the morning he brought them bagels and fruit, delivered coffee. In the evenings he enticed them to drinks. It was important to him to be well-liked by these officers. With Alonso’s assistance he had even treated them to a parade of loveseats and armchairs, letting them choose whatever furnishings they liked to make the hallway more comfortable. For the first few days each shift change had brought fresh new officers in, perhaps to prevent Adam from charming them; but he preferred it that way. It was a magnificent opportunity to win over as much of the police force as possible. An 8-hour shift was more than enough time to turn a suspicious disposition into a friendly one, with just a few creature comforts and niceties. Carson had been playing at that game his whole life.

He wandered now in the direction of the barricade, wondering who was on duty and whether or not they’d turn off the damned floodlights, at least in the hallway. Even if they would not, he liked the idea of interpersonal contact just now. He wanted to see if that would glide right through him too, if he’d float above it. He hoped it was Officer Luís, who had asked him to call her Mariana. Adam suspected she could prove to be a _very_ interesting diversion.

He found an even more interesting one.

“You aren’t authorized to be in this area,” the sentry called out sternly before Adam had taken two steps down the hallway.

“Good evening, Detective,” Adam lilted merrily in response. “Didn’t realize the precinct had you doing grunt work,” he added with a lascivious wink that would have made Officer Luís’ caramel-colored cheeks flush deliciously. Puget just stared at him, his face set grimly. He would be a very handsome man, Carson decided, if he would stop frowning all the time. Adam studied Puget with his head tipped at an angle, appraising. Body wasn’t bad either; mostly lean, still, though he obviously wasn’t a gym member. Maybe it was the tie and the shirtsleeves, maybe it was the gun under his arm, and maybe it was just the challenge of it, but for whatever reason the Misanthropic World-Weary Detective trope was really working for him tonight. Yes; Puget would be a satisfactory way to pass the time.

“Can I bring you a drink, Jade? Why don’t you sit down? At ease, soldier,” Carson joked with a little salute. The detective remained impassive. “There’s no reason to stand at attention all night long. It’s just you and I tonight, and I won’t tell.” Adam took a small step further into the hall, aware of how the detective’s shoulders stiffened, how his hands prepared themselves to reach for his gun.

“Mr. Carson. I don’t know what my people have led you to believe, but let me clarify: this is not a social visit. This is a crime scene, and you are _not authorized_ to approach it,” Puget spoke at last, his jaw grinding out the last sentence harshly.

Carson couldn’t help himself; he wondered, almost wanted to find out, what it would take for the detective to shoot him. Was he all talk? Or would it be as easy as it seemed? He could tell Puget wanted to pull his gun.

Adam took another step forward.

He wasn’t sure if he was disappointed or pleased when the detective dropped his hand from where it hovered near his holster after all, looking exasperated. “Fine,” he said scathingly. “Tramp up and down the hallway if it makes you happy, just stay away from my crime scene. And bring me a fucking coffee.” Adam, deciding on pleased, let an eyebrow rocket skywards at the brusque request. Puget stared right back at him, unblinking. “What?” Puget snapped. “I’m not damn well saying _please_.”

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=8874>  



	3. Femme Fatale

A sunny day in the Marin headlands and not a shadow to skulk in—nothing like a boulevard lined in sun-dappled palms to make a man with delusions of pulp novels feel foolish. Foolish and sweaty. With a touch of reluctance, Hunter removed his long coat and folded it over his arm. It did little to improve his mood, but he acknowledged that it might make him somewhat less conspicuous as he tailed Wynn Wednesday. Although the bowling shirt and slacks he was sporting underneath weren’t exactly low profile either.

Was Hunter Burgan a shit PI? It was a question he often asked himself. It wasn’t for lack of taking the work, or himself, seriously; and it wasn’t for lack of due diligence. His methods were just a little… overly orthodox. Image was very important to him, as he held it ought to be to any independent businessman. And if he preferred to do things according to the trenchcoat-in-a-dark-alley school of thought, well, as long as he got results, who was to say he was wrong? And did he ever get results.

Or anyway he certainly _planned_ to get them. He had never had a case like this before—a real one, that is, with busty dames and murder most foul and a hard-as-nails detective who’d seen it all before heading up the investigation. He felt like a character in one of his novels, far more like one than taking pictures of cheating husbands or depressingly continuing the search for loved ones who either did not want to be found, or of whom there was nothing left to find, ever had. So he was maybe overdoing it a little bit. The whole reason he’d gotten into this business was to work cases like this one, and he wanted to do it right.

He surreptitiously brushed his fingers over the handle of his pistol under the pretense of adjusting his shirt, reassuring himself that it was secure. The shirt was clownish, but it was the only thing he owned that hung loosely enough to conceal the gun holstered at the small of his back. Wynn Wednesday was 5’10”, 130 pounds, and dazzlingly blonde, not the kind of broad he expected to need to defend himself from—not in a .38 Colt Special loaded with hollow-points kind of way, anyway—but she _had_ lied to the police. That could mean she was scared, that she was concerned about her reputation—or that she was hiding something. That she was dangerous.

Burgan believed that his client had told the truth and Ms. Wednesday had lied to the cops. Dames did, in his experience. And Carson seemed too obvious to him. Motive, means, opportunity—all were quite clear. The SFPD certainly had eaten it up, right off the silver platter. They had questioned Wednesday and then let her go, despite Carson’s reports that she had been on the scene. That made her as much suspect as he was, if the police were being thorough. It was no secret her family had fallen on hard times; why couldn’t she and Carson have been in on it together, for the money? Anything, Hunter believed, was possible. If the SPFD were willing to let her go because they favored Carson as the perp, and the evidence seemed strong enough that they got sloppy, well, he would be there to pick up where they left off. To clean up their mess for them, and catch the killer too. Because he was Hunter Burgan, private eye.

It was catchy, he’d be the first to admit. Considerably cheered, Hunter wondered if he should grow a mustache, like Magnum. Maybe it would make the bowling shirt look more professional. Tom Selleck had gotten away with—no, he had _rocked_ —some gaudy-ass menswear.

Wynn Wednesday, twenty yards ahead, paused unexpectedly in the doorway of a dinky supermercado, waking Hunter from his reverie. It wasn’t a faux-authentic grocery for vegans and snobs with ridiculous prices designed to catch the attention of high-class dames like herself; it was small and dumpy, with hand-scrawled advertisements in the windows and a rickety old electric fan buzzing in the doorway, a place to get soda made with cane sugar and chorizo so fresh it could make a grown man weep. After a moment’s hesitation, Wynn ducked in the doorway. Today, it seemed, Hunter was that grown man.

Master of intuition that he was, Burgan could still only speculate on what would bring Wynn Wednesday into a store like this. It was true that her family had fallen upon hard times—he had verified this much-hushed rumor himself—but he didn’t think things were so grim she would be bargain-hunting in locally-owned Mexican groceries. People of her social standing rarely took austerity measures as far as even a Jewel-Osco. Could she have the same weakness for authentic chorizo that he did? Had an overpowering craving for horchata pulled her from the street in the doors? Or, likeliest still, had she noted that she was being followed by a strange man in a bowling shirt and darted over the threshold in hopes that knife-wielding Hispanic bikers would protect her?

Following her inside, Hunter noticed a bright display of Jarritos soda—he selected a lime, inarguably their best flavor—and a dazzling selection of cinnamon candies that, he knew from experience, was as close to breathing fire as a mortal man could get—but no scowling, tattooed biker-bodyguard types. Indeed, all there was to see was a rather buxom Latina dame handing a paper packet of cigarettes over the counter to Wynn, who tore into the pack immediately with a kind of languished urgency. Pale yellow fingernails slit the cellophane and parted the foil wrapper. She fished out a cigarette and raised it to her lips before she cast him a cagey glance. Up close, she looked tired, the corners of her eyes puckered in a way telling of the wrinkles she’d have in a few years. Her cheeks looked hollow, her lipstick lurid against washed-out skin. Her golden hair was limp, ratty, unwashed. Even her outfit seemed ill-fitting, as if she had tugged too many times on the hem of her t-shirt and stretched it out of shape and hadn’t washed her jeans in a month. Her handbag, upon closer inspection, was a knockoff. It was a very good knockoff, but a knockoff all the same. From a distance, she had looked as put together and picturesque as any heiress out for an incognito stroll. Now she looked like the kind of bird you wouldn’t be surprised to find chain-smoking outside of a Mexican grocery. Ruddy, desperate, dangerous—his very first femme fatale. (And what else would she be, with a name like Wynn Wednesday? He should’ve seen it from the start.)

“You’d better not be more press,” Wynn said, watching closely as he laid his lime soda and a handful of crumpled bills on the counter. She kept her elbows in near her ribs, her unlit cigarette poised, prepared to flee. When Hunter did not respond, she snapped her large (also counterfeit) sunglasses from her purse and slid them onto her face. She fished around for matches next. Hunter didn’t want to spook her, but also sensed he did not have much time before the small segment of her attention that he had captured waned and he lost her.

“I _saw_ you following me?” Wynn said next, her tone so petulant and teenage he expected her to crack her gum at him next. “This _chica_ will call the police if I ask her to. Right, Lucita?”

The dame behind the counter pushed Hunter his change warily, waiting to see what would be expected of her as events unfolded. “ _No sé lo que está pasando. ¿Le está molestando, señorita?_ ”

“See?” Wynn said challengingly. Hunter cracked open his soda and took a refreshing swig.

“ _Está bien_ ,” Hunter reassured Lucita. He was fairly confident that ‘chica’ was the extent of Ms. Wednesday’s Spanish vocabulary. “ _Somos amigos_.” Relief washed over Lucita’s face and she nodded, retreating into what Hunter assumed was the storeroom. Wynn looked put off.

“Well I’ll call them then,” she said snottily, although she showed no threat of actually doing so. He’d caught her interest and he was holding it. That was usually the hardest part of his job. If asked, he would describe this situation as going well.

“Can you keep a secret, Ms. Wednesday?” he asked in his best, most gravelly voice. The spark of intrigue flickered. She looked at him over the tops of her sunglasses. Now for the impressive part. He pulled his ID case from his breast pocket and flipped it open like it was a badge. He held it out and waited for the ‘ooh’s and ‘aah’s.

“What is that even?” Wynn asked in the gum-cracking voice. It was least impressed-sounding tone of voice Hunter had ever heard. She could go into business coaching teenage girls to piss off their fathers with that voice.

“It’s my license,” Hunter replied, trying with moderate success to keep the annoyance out of his voice, “to privately investigate.” When Wynn failed to react with the proper awe and respect, he was forced to go on, “I’m a private investigator. Y’know—a dick, a gumshoe, a sleuth.”

Wynn Wednesday did not even need chewing gum to crack. The look on her face said it all.

“I’m investigating the murder of Eliza Carson and frankly I think your story is a little fishy, okay?” he added irritably. Finally recognition dawned on Wynn’s face. She slid her sunglasses back up her nose and turned on heel, stomping past the desperately whirring fan and out the door. She paused to light her cigarette as Hunter chased after her. She cast her spent match disdainfully at his feet.

“The only thing you have going for you right now,” Wynn told him between drags, “is that you aren’t a journalist.” She exhaled in his face and started off walking again. He kept close at her heels. “I already talked to the police, why should I talk to you? Ask ‘em. I’m innocent. I wasn’t even there.”

“Photographically speaking, you were on the scene when the body was discovered,” Hunter corrected her. “Get your story straight, Ms. Wednesday. Consistency goes a long way in court.”

Wynn frowned over her shoulder at him and picked up her pace. “Okay, I was _there_ , like, at the scene or whatever, but before, I mean. I barely even know the Carsons. So I’m not going to court.”

“You were with Adam Carson that night and there’s a reason you’re trying so hard to keep it out of the papers,” Hunter insisted, dogging her heels and trying to look, for the benefit of passersby, as if Wynn was indeed an _amiga_ of his and they frequently went for breakneck strolls, speaking in fast, angry voices, a few paces apart through this particular neighborhood. What he was doing wasn’t actually illegal, just highly creepy, but he didn’t relish the thought of another encounter with the dour head detective nonetheless. “This is your chance to tell me what that reason is, Wynn, before I go digging around in your closet for it myself.”

Instead of caving under the pressure of this challenging threat, Wynn called back, “My closet?”

“Y’know—the one you keep your skeletons in,” Hunter explained, exasperated. This broad was intractable. He couldn’t tell if it was all a brilliant defense or if she was actually dumb as a brick. In case this wasn’t explicit enough for her, he continued, making certain to enunciate clearly. “You have secrets. If you make me, I will find them and I will not be merciful when I do. Or we can just the two of us have a private conversation about the events of that night, and no one will have to know your business but you and I. You’re looking a little rough these days, Ms. Wednesday. From where I’m standing it looks like you can use whatever mercy you can get.”

Wynn stopped so suddenly Hunter nearly broke his neck swerving into a fire hydrant to avoid plowing her over. “ _Fine_ ,” Wynn said, lowering her sunglasses so that he could experience the full splendor of her eye roll. “You can meet me at my apartment tomorrow night. But come alone, okay? And don’t bring a camera or a tape recorder or anything creepy you can kill me with, or I _will_ call the police.”

“That’s fair,” Hunter agreed, making a mental note to bring all three of the items she’d forbidden him. “I can do that. Thank you for your time, Ms. Wednesday,” he called after her, standing beside the fire hydrant and watching her speed away.

 

* * *

 

There was absolutely no reason in the world he shouldn’t vacate the premises the second his replacement arrived. He had no warrant—in fact, he had the opposite of a warrant, since his idiot brother had raised such a fuss with the judge about whether or not any evidence could still be gathered from Carson’s ballroom and whether or not a police presence in his home was still justified—and he was bone-tired from a night of being chatted up by a man who was almost certainly a killer. But something niggled at Puget as he made his way out the front door, a sense of something left undone. His instincts were usually good. He made a point of trusting them.

So he followed this one in creeping around the edge of the house and making his way stealthily back onto the grounds. Once he’d cleared the hedge wall (a considerable feat in itself) it was pretty smooth sailing—the immense shrubbery kept the gardens quite secluded from even the impressive view of the mezzanine, a key feature he’d noted on the night of the murder. It was what initially led him to believe that, had someone fled the scene, they would have headed out here, into the burbling crowds of partygoers. It was a rookie mistake to assume that guilty parties panic and try to get away from populous areas after committing a crime. That’s the kind of thinking particularly trademarked to the innocent. A sane, non-murdering individual feels comfortable in imagining their own guilt and horror upon committing a crime, and predicting their behavior after it—running, hiding, cringing, sobbing, confessing or being haunted for the duration of their natural lives. But those who _do_ engage in murders tend think a little differently from those who don’t; it is one of their key defining features. They think differently. They _behave_ differently. Thus with the killing.

Being a police detective was not as different from being a murderer as you might think. Over the years of his illustrious career (and even in his inner monologue Jade used the word sarcastically), Puget had become adept at thinking the way a criminal does. He was especially gifted at predicting pathological behavior. He had presented at a conference once on getting inside the mind of a serial killer, and it had boiled down to this: if you’re going to catch a killer, you’ve got to train yourself diligently to be as batshit insane as they are. You have to let yourself go over the edge. That was why, in Jade’s opinion, so many careers ended after an encounter with a particularly gruesome murder, or a string of them. It wasn’t that the bloody pictures of the killings were burned indelibly into your eyelids and you could never close your eyes without seeing them again; it wasn’t the revulsion and horror at the killer’s brutality and twistedness that haunted, and broke, so many good cops. It was never forgiving yourself for the things _you_ thought, _you_ felt, _you_ might as well have done by the time you were through. Because that was how you caught the fucker. You became him.

Although not exactly a horticulturist himself, the detective found he’d be the first to admit that the gardens were lovely. There had been the rather inelegant moment with the hedge, but from that point onward, Carson’s garden was really very soothing. Mazelike, carefully laid cobbles wound through halls of hedge, revealing pleasant nooks with stone benches and unlit lanterns, brilliant patches of blooms, ferns, and even a few painstakingly tended prairie grasses in every shade of every color imaginable, and a fountain far more aesthetic and modest than the one in the main courtyard splashing away merrily at the garden’s heart. Jade wandered through an open doorway in the hedge into a pleasant, shaded grove of fruit trees, which were small and gnarled with low-hanging branches. Climbing roses grew in the hedges and wrapped around the trunks of some of the trees; Jade wasn’t certain if it was neglect or careful planning that had resulted in the rosy trunks, but it was uncommonly beautiful either way. He stood in the perfumed shade of one such tree and bent at the knees, his head bleary from being up all night and his back stiff from standing—he’d refused Carson’s repeated offers of a chair, first out of protocol and later out of stubbornness that had grown at a rate to match his mounting soreness—and gave it a try: he selected a fragile-looking white rose, put his nose up to it, and sniffed.

“What a load of crap,” he muttered to himself as he straightened up. He was not, it turned out, all that impressed with the smell of roses. Ridiculous flower anyways, he decided. He preferred the hardier, more sensible variety that sprouted up of their own accord, scrubby and determined, between sidewalk cracks and along highways. There were clumps of orange ones edging in his door at home, number 61B, that really brightened up the place. He’d been downright pleased when they’d popped up there. “What a load of crap,” he muttered again, just to distance himself from all the thoughts about flower preferences. Clearly, Puget decided, he was dangerously low on sleep.

Jade moved away from the fruit trees and tried to put himself in the mindset of a guilty man. The warm air, hazy with sweetness, and his own weariness made it difficult. Criminals did not, in his experience, spend much time thinking about the scent of azaleas and whether a peach or a pear tree would be better to take a nap under (peach. The fruits were softer, and wouldn’t hurt as much as a pear might if one fell unexpectedly down on you).

The problem was that Puget wasn’t even certain a killer _had_ fled the scene. None of his suspects on the scene had been armed, and they wouldn’t have had much time between Eliza’s final scream and the arrival of the photographer, the debutante, and Carson to hide an implement of murder—a smoking gun, as it were. In Jade’s opinion, that made Carson the most likely suspect. He was the only one who would have known the house well enough to hide the weapon—determined by forensics to have most likely been a kitchen knife—where the police wouldn’t uncover it and return to the scene, arriving at the same time as Marchand and Wednesday. (Assuming, of course, that they all had arrived separately. Wednesday and Carson differed in opinion on that point.) But why would he return to the scene? He could have disappeared into the party instead and had a hundred eye witnesses of his whereabouts at the approximate time of the murder. Placing himself on the scene just didn’t make _sense_.

It was a mistake, Jade knew, to expect murders to make sense. They are not logical. They are rarely well-executed. Very few killers could tell you conclusively why they had done the things they’d done, made those particular choices. It was a mistake to think that what made sense to Jade would make sense to a very ill man. Because Carson, Jade believed, was an ill man. The detective had filled out the Hare checklist on his behalf; the results spoke for themselves. And Jade didn’t believe that this was a crime of passion. It may have looked that way on the surface, but to him it reeked of premeditation. The disappearance of the weapon. The hundreds of possible suspects. The perfect alibi. The only thing Carson hadn’t planned for was the way plans fell apart. The damn photographer getting there so quickly. Wynn Wednesday losing her nerve and refusing to give him an alibi. Eliza’s scream. These were factors outside the control of even the most controlled killer.

Jade rounded the corner, trailing his fingers along the soft greenery of the hedge, and came upon a small tilled field, about ten yards square. The rows and irrigation ditches were picture-perfect; a small wooden fence with matching gate ran along its single open edge, where the hedge had been cut back to let in sunlight. Most of the rows were barren now, but a few still boasted late-season crops—he recognized brussel sprouts, onions, tomatoes, and a tumbling vine of pumpkins, among others he had less success with. None of the plants looked like they were thriving, but they were all neatly tended. He crouched near one to examine the leaves for signs of wilt or decay. He rubbed a tomato leaf between his fingers. It felt dry and a little powdery, the veins in it firm, just as they ought to. There was no overgrowth, no weeds, and the stalks and leaves were strong and whole. If this had been Eliza’s vegetable patch, the plants would be showing signs of neglect. She had been dead almost a week, and it hadn’t rained since. That meant the garden most likely belonged to—

“Detective,” a pleasant, lightly scolding voice came from behind him. Carson let himself through the gate, gardening gloves and tools in hand. Jade eyed the shears and the weed-pulled surreptitiously. Even the spade could be deadly, were it wielded with ill intent, but nothing in his quaint little basket matched Eliza’s wounds. “And here I thought I’d shown you out.”

 

* * *

 

The look on Puget’s face as he leapt to his feet was almost too much for Adam. Like a kid caught in the cookie jar, or passing a note during class, or fondling his sister’s undergarments. Any chance he might have had of explanation was undone by the surprise and guilt that flashed on his face before he got his characteristic frown back under control. It was hard not to laugh at him, but that would spoil the game. Adam wasn’t about to waste a chance to make Detective Jade Puget sweat.

Carson set down his gardening things and drew nearer the ashen-faced detective. It was clear the man had no idea what to say for himself. The laugh bubbled up in his throat again. Somewhat heroically, he suppressed it. “It’s not nice to snoop,” he said instead, in a low voice, one both teasing and dangerous.

“I—” Jade said, voice a little strangled. He cleared his throat and went on, “I apologize. I will remove myself from the premises immediately.” He turned promptly to go back the way he’d come—the long way, through the gardens, but then Adam was blocking the other exit—and Adam let him get all the way to the archway before he spoke again, freezing the detective in his tracks.

“What’s the phrase you’re so fond of?” Adam went on lightly, as if it were all a grand game, stepping closer. “ _You are not authorized to be in this area_. So what illicit pursuits bring you here, I wonder? Not looking for clues, are we? That would be very bad of you, I think, to go poking around for clues in a restricted area. I don’t think the SFPD would be at all pleased.”

Adam let slip a small, tight grin as Puget took a reflexive step back, away from him, and backed up against the hedge wall. “If you feel your rights have been infringed upon, then of course you can report my badge to my superiors,” he said as he did so, trying not to let the alarm show on his face. Adam didn’t think he was worried about being reported—from what his lawyer had told him, Puget had been a good cop for too many years to be in danger of anything more than a slap on the wrist. No, he was alarmed because Adam was closing in on him. He was _afraid_ —but not, it seemed, for his life. For Puget made no move to draw his gun, or even place a hand reassuringly upon the butt of it.

Adam felt he could have purred.

“Oh, I’m not sure that will be necessary,” Adam said, his voice low in his throat now, close enough to Puget to touch. “I won’t tell if you won’t,” he whispered, leaning his head in. He held it there, forehead nearly brushing Puget’s own, and sought the detective’s eyes with his own. They looked wild, the eyes of a prey animal, caught—the eyes of a man who knew it was a trap but went ahead anyway, because he had to, because he couldn’t help it, because he didn’t have a choice. Adam let himself laugh at last, a slow, rich sound that bubbled up from deep within him and left his lips as warm and thick as caramel.

Powerless to stop himself, Puget dipped his chin and moved forward to intercept Adam’s laugh, biting it off at the source with a rough, demanding kiss. He led with teeth instead of softness and Adam answered in kind—eagerly, victoriously—nipping giddily at tobacco-flavored lips. Adam stepped forward, forcing Puget to rock back into the hedge, and pushed his tongue deeper into the detective’s mouth. Where their tongues clashed Adam tasted ash, carcinogenic and acrid, and liked it; it matched the violence and the anger Puget kissed him with. Puget, held up now more by the thorny lattice of the hedge than his own feet, bit down sharply, unexpectedly, on Adam’s probing tongue—too sharply. Adam jerked back from the sudden pain, the taste of blood. Adam touched the back of his wrist to his lips; it came back red. His eyes flickered up to Puget’s uncertainly. Had it been an accident? Or had he spoiled the game by pulling away?

Puget stared proudly, cruelly back at him, breathing hard, open-mouthed. His teeth gleamed. It had been deliberate, Adam decided. He’d been meant to recoil. His face felt hot and his insides squirmed with humiliation, conditions under which his arousal thrived. The more it embarrassed him the more emboldened his now-visible cock grew. In the meantime his mouth filled with his own blood.

The detective extricated himself from the hedge and drew himself up, his gaze a challenge Adam was unable to meet. His cheeks flamed, his nerve lost. Game over. Any coy recovery or hard, salt-iron kisses were off the table—he had flinched first. He had pressed his advantage and lost it.

Adam watched the detective’s receding back disappearing around a corner in the hedge, a Cheshire smirk still hovering where he had stood. Adam touched his tender wound gently to the insides of his cheek, testing it. The elation of victory had deserted him; he was left with a hard-on, a mouth full of secondhand smoke, and his own shame. But not to worry. He’d win next round. The game was a long way from over.

End Notes:

The Hare checklist is a real measure of sociopathy, and its story is actually really interesting! You can read about it in detail in the book The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson, and also probably pretty sufficiently on Wikipedia. Thanks for reading and let me know what you think!

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=8874>  



	4. The Maltese Millionaire

>   
>  As one murder suspect to another, I know what Adam Carson is going through. The staring eyes, the waves of guilt assuaging you from every direction, as if all of San Francisco hopes you fry—not to mention the stress and convolutions involved in endless legal counsel from the finest representation money can buy (if only Mr. Carson were footing the bill for us both!). Still, to add to Carson’s week, we are all of us too familiar with the recent tragedy his family has suffered. Bad enough to be accused of the murder of the decade; imagine if you had the business of mourning a brutally slaughtered mother to contend with at the same time. 
> 
> While a weaker man (yours truly comes to mind) might be overwhelmed with grief or terror at a time like this, Carson has risen above that mantle of self-involvement and taken a break from pleading his innocence and burying his mother long enough to return to his passion: that selfless crusade for better health care options for underprivileged children. Although Carson was in police custody during the time of the dedication of the top-of-the-line health care facility he worked so hard to finance, he has certainly put in his hours at the newly opened Eliza Carson Memorial Children’s Hospital.
> 
> “He’s here every morning when I punch in and he’s here every evening when I leave,” says head RN Suzanne Dawkins. “The other day his lawyers were following him through the cancer ward, trying to have a meeting, but Adam is so passionate about his work with the kids. Every piece of paper they gave him he folded up into one of those little animals—you’ve never heard seven-year-old chemo patients laugh so hard.” Ms. Dawkins is laughing too, by the time she’s finished telling me the story. She is far from the only one to notice his dedication to his cause—in fact, during the short time I was there, I was approached by not just staff members but parents and patients as well. All had a story about Carson to share, some eyes gleaming with laughter, and others with tears.
> 
> Outside the hospital, however, his mother’s murder trial is fast approaching. Carson certainly has the goodwill of the sick children and their parents of the Bay area; but the police are not convinced. I’m sweating around the collar myself as the date of the trial looms and the police fail to turn up any hard evidence, without which it will be difficult to make any kind of sentence stick. I can’t speak for Carson, but as for me, I’m crossing my fingers that SF’s finest stumble upon the murder weapon soon—after all, _my_ fingerprints aren’t on it.
> 
> **Pictured Below: Carson presents Maisie Hoeblich, age 5, with an origami elephant.**

 

Davey leaned back from his computer and bit his lip. It was his first real byline—his gruesome crime scene photos had made the first page under the most memorable headline of the year, but his editor hadn’t let him write a word of the article, in spite of his being a first-hand witness. The deal Carson had worked out with the _Chronicle_ , though, put him in a whole new position. One article a week leading up to the trial, and a daily column of court coverage for the duration. Opportunities like this just didn’t happen; they _certainly_ didn’t get hand-delivered on silver platters. But that was what had happened.

Being accused of murder was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

Despite his assurance of ongoing publication no matter what he wrote, Davey didn’t know how he felt about his first real piece of journalism. (The pieces he’d done in college, even the one that he won a national Mark of Excellence for, didn’t seem anymore to count. No one read college newspapers, did they? Not even the students of the college, most of the time. But everyone in San Francisco was going to be reading his coverage of the Carson murder trial.) Carson had assured him that he was free to write whatever he wished and portray Adam in whatever light he thought best captured the truth; and yet he’d written a glowing piece of propaganda instead. Whenever he tried to sit down at the keyboard and apply an objective eye to it, he found himself playing Spider Solitaire instead. (Fun fact: you cannot uninstall Spider Solitaire from a Windows operating system. You can delete the icon, sure; you can even remove the program. But it is built into the .exe files and, no matter what you try to do to banish it, it will never really be gone. It will always be there, lurking, waiting to spring upon your moment of weakness as if it were a juicy fly struggling in a web. Not that Davey had any kind of firsthand experience with that, or anything.)

It was just that—well, a lot of what he’d written was true. Everyone he’d talked to at the hospital had positively gushed about Carson. A mother had pressed his hand in hers and wept, recounting the joy she’d seen in her daughter’s eyes after Adam had done some wonderful, selfless thing or another. The children in the neuroscience ward—these were children who needed _brain surgery_ , mind you, many of whose operations were being paid for by Carson’s fundraising efforts—had painted a hallway mural that he rose up in the center of, messianic, with arms spread wide and beatific grin gleaming. The children were in a ring around him, looking healthy and happy. The goddamned sun was crying happy tears in the upper right corner. The kids had come up with the design on their own when Carson told them they could pick any wall they wanted and paint whatever they chose on it. At least he hadn’t taken a picture of _that_. The mural would have made an especially sickening article.

The other problem was that Davey felt for the guy, at least a little. It was true that he was a terrifying guy, and that Davey wasn’t convinced he wouldn’t kill him for writing something unflattering. It was also true that he had probably killed his own mother, very likely for money that would have been his when she died in ten or fifteen years anyway. But Davey kind of liked him. Adam had treated him with just as much gentle attention and kindness as he had the children, when they’d spent some time together in the cancer ward. He’d said thoughtful and validating things about Davey’s work—his _college_ work, that is, which Carson had taken the time to track down and read—and joked around with him in an almost brotherly fashion. Quite in spite of himself Davey had begun to feel solidarity with the man—as if they were both wrongly accused, both facing the same peril. And though he’d made a joke about it in the article, Carson _was_ pretty much paying for his legal representation. He was being paid by the word now, and receiving royalties off his photos—even his bad ones—that would pay his rent three times over. The only reason the _Chronicle_ was so interested in him, and remunerating him so well, was because Carson had insisted he be the one to do this coverage. It helped that he was something of a celebrity himself these days, what with being accused of a very flashy murder and all.

Still, being a murder suspect wasn’t all fun and games. He was pretty certain that the police wanted to kill him, for example, for his stunt with the memory card; they had turned up with a warrant for it, and a requisition order for all digital copies of his photos, only a few hours after they’d officially fallen under the protection of the first amendment. And then there was the fact that Adam Carson, while almost certainly guilty, was also almost certainly not going to go to prison for it. It was far more likely that the murder would be pinned on some poor, no-name patsy who would be sentenced to three life sentences and at least one lethal injection while Carson, smirking atop a towering pillar of money, walked free. And Davey happened to be something of a no-name patsy himself. Whatever minor celebrity he made for himself by covering the trial would only make the public more gleeful when he was declared guilty. They’d know his name, they’d have read his articles—he made a mental note to stock up on first printings, because they’d probably sell like eBay hotcakes if he was convicted—and they’d throw a ticker-tape parade of hatred and self-satisfaction while he was frog-marched to the chair.

Davey shuddered involuntarily and glanced back over the simpering article he’d written over the course of the last 16 hours before his deadline. (Damn that smug spider.) _Unless Adam protects you_ , something whispered seductively in his brain. _Unless Adam likes you too much to let you go to prison. Unless you write such amazing, fantastic, Pulitzer-quality articles about how unlikely a suspect he is that he pins it on the butler instead._

After all, Davey told himself, that butler _had_ been pretty rude.

He took a deep breath, copied the file into an open email to his editor, and pressed _send_ before he could change his mind.

 

* * *

 

The hallway Hunter found himself in was prime skulking territory. Which actually made it the sort of place he wasn’t all that comfortable being at 10:45 on a Wednesday night. The carpet was rank and water damaged; he could hear televisions, wailing babies, or shouting from behind nearly every door, with the notable exception of the one he was standing in front of. Where the hell was Wynn Wednesday?

She’d asked him to meet her at her apartment, and had not furnished her address, perhaps as a test of his detecivery’s merit. Or maybe she liked being followed. In any event, he had snooped, and pried, and wheedled information, and done a light bit of tailing, and he was confident that this hovel was what Wynn was calling home these days. Her family still had a penthouse in a much nicer neighborhood—he’d checked—and a modest lodge up in the mountains. Wynn Wednesday was a woman with options, and this is what she’d chosen? No. He didn’t believe it for a moment. She was up to something she didn’t want linked back to her, something she wanted to hide from the press and her permanent record. Curiouser and curiouser.

“What _are_ you involved in, Wynn?” he murmured aloud to himself, because it sounded thematic. He buffed his nails on his pant leg and examined them closely. He checked his watch. He leaned casually against the wall. He went ahead and knocked again, for the billionth time. He was running out of ways to pass the time. There was a sudden noise from the apartment across the hall and his hand went to the butt of his gun without his permission. Burgan’s fear of one of Wynn’s neighbors coming into the hallway was mounting irrationally. He was a grown-ass man, he reminded himself. If someone gave him a hard time he could always shoot them.

10:52 and he heard footsteps, someone coming up the stairs. Sweat prickled on his palms as he negotiated with himself about the likelihood of a firefight, and whether he should draw his gun now or, like a sane and stable individual, wait it out and get a visual on the civilian he’d be menacing. He hadn’t come to a conclusion yet when an initially unrecognizable Wynn Wednesday emerged from the stairwell and headed towards him. Hunter relaxed, but only a little. Something was afoot here.

Wynn’s shining platinum hair was pulled back into a very high, bouncy ponytail. She wore thick black glasses that Clark Kent would have envied—although judging by the thickness and opacity of the lenses, Hunter guessed they were fakes—and the black-jeans-black-tee ensemble, complete with colorful logo splashed on her chest, trademarked to servers at a nearby restaurant chain. Her face was brightened with a minimal amount of make-up and her face bore the weary residue of an 80-watt grin that had been plastered to it, Hunter guessed again, for most of the night.

If he wasn’t badly mistaken, Wynn Wednesday had just gotten home from _work_. No wonder she was hiding.

“You’re l—” he started to say, but Wynn cut him off irritably, pulling a plastic nametag reading WINNIE! off her chest and fumbling keys out of her purse with the other hand. “Closing shift, all right?” she snapped. She unlocked her door and swung it open. “Get inside,” she ordered, all but shoving him into the darkened apartment. She slammed and locked the door behind them before making any move to turn on a light.

She left him standing in the small living room and went bustling into the kitchen with her purse. Hunter looked around curiously, though there wasn’t much to see. The state of the furnishings indicated they’d come with the place, and cheaply. The room seemed to be clean, but it was hard to tell—the wood floors were stained, scratched, and peeling; the paint on the walls had been slapped on unevenly, and tiny white drops of it had spattered the floor, leaving it looking perpetually dusty. The furniture was similarly grim. It was an apartment that would look unappealing and dirty, Hunter concluded, no matter how clean its occupant kept it. There was one small window only, and no overhead light. The narrow archway to the galley kitchen was in one corner of the room; the door to what Hunter guessed was the bedroom stood in the other. He would be surprised if the whole place was any more than 300 square feet.

Wynn came back out of the kitchen bearing pepper spray in one hand and a wooden-handled steak knife in the other. Hunter was so startled he almost forgot to reach for his gun. He snaked one hand casually as if to rest it on the small of his back—not obvious at all—and gripped the reassuringly solid handle of his Colt Special. He didn’t draw it yet. This was interesting; he wanted to see how it played out.

 _Steak knife_ , he noted silently. He’d stolen a copy of the prelim autopsy report from the police station on his way out. Wynn pulling a kitchen knife on him matched the MO.

“Easy there, doll,” he said, putting his empty hand up as if he were harmless, a gesture pretty well negated by the hand he kept behind his back. “Don’t let’s do something we’ll regret.”

“I have been getting phone calls,” Wynn said in a quaking voice. She sounded scared as she was angry—never a good combo when you’re on the receiving end of the steak knife. (But then, steak knife—no point, serrated blade—not a stabbing weapon. Not even much good for slashing. Steak knives were sawing cuts only. Such a knife might keep a potential attacker at bay, but she’d be hard-pressed to maneuver into the kind of situation where she’d be able to do much damage with it. Professionals, seasoned killers, and even first-time hatchetmen should know better than a steak knife. A rolling pin would be more deadly. Maybe WINNIE! didn’t belong on his suspect list after all.)

“I have been getting _threatening_ fucking phone calls,” she specified, keeping the knife and the pepper spray poised to strike. “Was it you? Are you trying to scare me into talking to you?” Her face contorted and Hunter realized she was on the verge of tears. Her voice broke on a sob and the knife began to shake in her hand as she asked, “Are you—are you going to kill me? The man on the phone said he’d—” She couldn’t get any more words out. Tears streaked through her make-up and down her cheeks. She looked soft, innocent, pretty as a child’s doll.

He let go of the Colt and stuck both hands out now, low and palm-up, nonthreatening. He was nearly overcome with the urge to protect her. “Of course not,” he said as soothingly as he could. He moved forward slowly, reaching up gently to take the knife from her hand. “You’re safe now. Can you tell me exactly what he said to you?”

“He told me to go to the police,” Wynn managed in a whisper, staring tearfully into Hunter’s eyes. “He told me to go to the police and tell them the truth or he’d—or he’d kill me.”

Through great fortitude of character Hunter refrained from remarking on what a reasonable demand that seemed. Imagine, telling the police the truth—how novel! How much easier that would make the lives of everyone involved!

Hunter didn’t say this, for which he thought he deserved some kind of prize. This was, he decided, a delicate situation—one which could be turned to his advantage. He fixed Wynn with a look of deep concern and asked her, voice hushed worriedly, “What are you going to do?”

Wynn rested her forehead in her palms and took a few deep, wobbling breaths. When she lifted her head again she seemed more in control of herself, but tears still filled her eyes. “I was with Adam that night,” she confessed to the carpet. “But if I tell the police that, he’ll—he’ll get in even more trouble.” Tears began to trickle down her cheeks again and she actually wrung her hands, as if she were a character in _Little House on the Prairie_. Hunter, meanwhile, nonchalantly angled his right breast pocket towards her, so the microcassette recorder there would pick her up more clearly.

“Even more trouble?” he asked carefully, trying not to spook her. “But you’d be giving him an alibi. You’d get him off the hook.”

Wynn shook her head, staring fixedly at the ground. “No I wouldn’t,” she said hoarsely. “I was with him that night. For a while. And then he left, and I was wandering around the house, you know, looking in the rooms—there are some really nice rooms in their house—” At last, dramatically, she raised her gaze and met Hunter’s eyes. “And that’s when I heard her scream,” Wynn said. “And I ran down the hall towards the sound. I thought someone was hurt, that I could… help them… And I saw him standing there. Standing over her. Covered in blood.”

Softly, under his breath, Hunter said, “ _Shit_.” Hearing him, Wynn screwed up her face and burst right back into tears.

 

* * *

 

 _“Shit_ ,” Jade whispered to himself, thumping his head rhythmically against the shower tiles as he did so. “Shit, shit, shit.”

Fundamentally, or so he believed, he was not a particularly stupid or self-destructive person. His career had puttered along nicely into its current stagnated state; he took decent enough care of his body and cleaned his home pretty regularly; he got his cruiser’s oil changed more or less when the sticker from Merlin said he should. He had never electrocuted himself, microwaved tinfoil or started a house fire by any other means; had never discharged his firearm accidentally or deliberately into any part of his own anatomy; had never driven drunk or run his vehicle off the road into a gulley or a canyon; had never lied on his taxes or made loud hooker jokes in church; had never killed a man just to watch him die. He did smoke cigarettes. That was the dumbest thing he did, though. All told, he had always felt fairly secure in his own trustworthiness and validity as a human being. He was not, generally, a spectacularly idiotic creature.

Or so he had always believed.

Jade lifted his head long enough to scrub soap across his forehead and then dropped it back onto the wall of the shower, letting the soap run stinging into his eyes. He squeezed them shut half-heartedly a beat too late to be of any use. “Shit,” he said again, this time about his streaming eyes, but without much feeling.

Okay. Worst-case scenario time. Jade stuck his face under the faucet and cranked the heat as if he could scald himself clean, burn the past away, sear the memory of Carson from his skin. What was the worst that could happen? A short, bitter bark of laughter escaped his mouth at the question. It was not rhetorical.

Losing his badge if he came forward now—causing a mistrial if it came out at the wrong moment—being accused as an accomplice? Could they do that? He was certainly fucking acting like one. Maybe if he just went to the chief and explained ( _explained what? Whoops, your cock got the jump on you and you dry-humped Eliza Carson’s killer in the fucking hedges? So sorry, Chief, knew you’d understand?_ ) he’d get slapped on the wrist and taken off the case. ( _Maybe if it was a big-breasted witness. Then you’d get high fives. But a sociopathic suspect with a cock? Not fucking likely._ )

Or maybe—and Jade’s mouth actually fell open in horror as the thought crashed into him with the speed and reckless devastation of a runaway train—maybe Carson, like any intelligent murder suspect, would mention the incident to his lawyer. _My brother_. That was, far and away, the worst that could happen. Carson would tell Smith; Smith would call Jade onto the witness stand for cross-examination; there would be a murmur of surprise and distress throughout the courtroom; he would confess under oath like an asshole, because if nothing else he had always been honest; and then any and all evidence collected, handled or even fucking _looked_ at by Jade (which would be all of it, because he was head detective and everything passed over his desk) would be inadmissible in court, forever and always, and Adam Carson—and every other suspect—would walk fucking free. Jade’s career would fall around him in tatters. He would be a figurehead of public shame and disgrace. He would never work as a detective, or even a traffic cop, again—it would be a lifetime of mall security for him, if he didn’t turn out to have the decency to shoot himself in the head before relinquishing his weapon—fuck, fuck, fuck—and Carson would never be able to be retried. Forget a mistrial. His indiscretion had just served up Carson his inheritance and his innocence on the same bloodstained silver platter.

Head spinning, Jade found himself sitting on the shower floor wrestling with the urge to vomit. After a lifetime of diligent police work, of upholding the letter of the goddamned law, of being so discreet he’d become discrete—after attaining masters-level reserves of chastity and self-denial—how could he be so careless?

Jade emitted a wordless groan and reached up to shut off the water before dropping his wet head back onto his knees. Carson wasn’t even that good-looking. Jade had been tempted by handsomer men, of the type he favored—usually sandy-haired, soft athletic build, shy smiles and bashful eyes; he turned to putty for a man looking up shyly through his bangs—and he had resisted, had walked away, or had shakily, sloppily, tenderly indulged himself in a single night of their company. These perfectly kind, thoughtful, gentle men he longed to take to slow, drawn-out conversational dinners; to movies and concerts and plays; men he wanted to have picnics with, go hiking with, go to the beach with. Men he wanted to get a dog with, to move in with, to wash and dry dishes with. Men he wanted to love.

These men, the ones he wanted to romance, he’d taken to giving false names to. To using in terrible, thoughtless ways, and never calling again. What else could he do? His job was at stake. So what was he doing, dizzy and out of control, with violence and anger forcing himself onto a man like Carson? A dangerous, calculating, charming, useless, and unabashedly criminal man. A dark-haired, cold-eyed social princeling who served only the most carnal, the most terrible purposes. A likely sociopath; a likely killer. The sort whose behavior he could understand, predict—whose skin he could crawl inside, whose eyes he could look out of, if he could bear the creeping distaste of it. A man he could never love.

A man he could only become.

Had he really thrown his career away for _that_? For a single furious, gasping kiss? For the dirt in the tread of his shoes, the snags on the back of his jacket, the green chlorophyll stain on his trousers. The bead of Carson’s blood on his shirt cuff, where he’d wiped it from his mouth. Because that was all he had left of their cataclysmic kiss. Telltale signs and stains. _Evidence_. No fond memories, no feeling, no stirring of desire. Just mounting, burning shame, chased by icy dread. His mouth tasted metallic, like he could spit pennies, and he retched. Rubbed his eyes. Got unsteadily to his feet. Had to dry off, make his way outside. Needed a goddamn cigarette.

Jade dressed himself badly, hands too shaky for anything more sophisticated than a zipper. Fumbled his lighter and his cigarettes and let himself out onto the patio, leaving the door open. Didn’t usually do that—he had a thing about the cat and secondhand smoke. And insects in his home; he had a thing about that too. Nasty little fuckers. But right now he barely had the manual dexterity to light a cigarette. He flicked his Zippo on his jeans, flipping open the lid and lighting it with the fluid one-handed swipe across denim he’d spent so many months of high school perfecting. That part was okay. The trouble was in trying to hold his Camel still enough to ignite. Nice thing about fire, though, is that it burns. The flame leapt with its dependable eagerness onto the dry paper and tobacco and Jade pulled the first, best drag deep into him. He felt his lungs open up, expand, release some of their tightness. It was a false sensation, no doubt, but it always seemed he could breathe easier through a cigarette.

Jade exhaled luxuriously, feeling some of the anxiety seep out of him with the blue-grey smoke. He massaged his temples with his free hand and squinted at the sunset. They were probably missing him at the office by now; he’d left his phone in the cruiser cupholder, powered off, and hadn’t bothered heading back to the precinct. Today was the kind of day he needed his own shower for, his own patio. A few early autumn leaves had fallen onto the pavers; he let his eyes fall on them and narrow hatefully. Jade had never liked the fall. Even in California, it brought with it the smell of everything ending. He’d held a lifelong conviction that he would die in autumn, that the sweet rot of fallen leaves would be the last thing he ever breathed. He sucked harder on his Camel like it would protect him. The smoke filled his lungs, mouth, nose; all he could smell was burning. Better.

A dolorous meow and a sudden mass of cat throwing itself against his legs snapped Jade back into focus, into phase with reality. The Chairman, a monolith of grey-and-black tabby, rubbed himself against the detective and yowled again. Sighing, Jade stubbed out his cigarette on his little patio table and leaned down to rub his cat’s head. The family who used to live in the other half of the duplex—61A, as it were—had moved away and left the Chairman behind, about three years back. Hadn’t asked Jade if he minded. They’d just left, and the Chairman had started scratching on his sliding glass door instead of theirs, and later that day he’d found himself buying cat food and a 40 pound bag of litter, and some little catnip mice with bells on their tails that the Chairman clearly considered ridiculous and promptly ignored, and here he was, with a cat. He knew it was a cat-lady mentality, but living with the Chairman was better than living alone. Coming home to an empty house, eating meals over the sink or in the dark, no one knowing (or caring) if you came or you went, if you never came home again, if you had a heart attack in the shower and died. (Not that the Chairman would do much in any of these circumstances. He’d probably just move down another patio door, to another family and another name. Jade wasn’t convinced the cat wouldn’t eat him, if his rotting corpse started to smell more interesting than Eukanuba. Maybe that’s what had happened to his neighbors. Maybe they hadn’t moved away at all. There was no way of knowing.)

The cat was, generally, a pain in the ass. And, in spite of himself, Jade loved him. Maybe he _was_ a cat lady. Maybe he’d prequalified. Just add cat. Still, there was comfort in scratching the cat’s ears, and even more when the Chairman jumped up into Jade’s lap and drooled lightly on his hand. He felt much calmer, now. More himself. Maybe, somehow, miraculously, the world wouldn’t end. Maybe Carson—and the Chairman began to purr, as if to block out Jade’s pessimistic internal monologue—wouldn’t tell Smith. Maybe he’d prefer to extort money from Jade instead, or blackmail him into flubbing the investigation, or kill him next. There was no telling what excitement and wonder laid ahead.  


End Notes:

Fun facts about Spider Solitaire may or may not be from firsthand experience. Apartment described may or may not have been my first one. As always, please let me know what you think! I'm very open to any thoughts, criticisms, suggestions or Hunter love! Seriously, even if you just want to say something made you laugh or I spelled something wrong or you, too, are versed in the truly appalling noise a brake drum makes as it crumbles into dust, I'd love to hear from you. Oh shit! I almost forgot to say it! Guys, guys, guys: THE PLOT THICKENS. Okay. That's all. Be good.

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=8874>  



	5. The Big Sleep

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This week is short and bloody. Consider yourself warned. I don't own the boys and none of this ever happened.

Detective Jade Puget awoke in the least pleasant way possible. The Chairman was hunched in a large, bristling ball on his feet, producing a noise deep in his belly describable only as a growl (apparently no one had ever explained to him that cats do not growl), and there was apparently an earthquake going on downstairs. He sat up groggily and the Chairman streaked off the bed and down the hall. His reading glasses on the nightstand were rattling lightly in response to repeated, aggressive thumps from downstairs. The water in his glass quivered.

_Someone’s breaking down my door_ , he realized fuzzily. Jade lurched out of bed and onto his feet, taking only the time to fling open his nightstand drawer, pull out his sidearm, and flick off the safety before barreling down the stairs. He skidded to a stop at the front door, taking a moment to catch his breath and get his bearings. His heart was hammering in his chest like the door in its frame. He sniffed the air for smoke—nothing. No fire. So who the hell was kicking in his door, and why? His mind flashed to Carson ( _damn it_ ) but that was no good, needed a clear head for this kind of situation. Jade took a breath, braced himself, and flung open the door.

Officer Pullman stumbled across the threshold and froze, met with the sight of his respected superior in his boxer shorts, hair rumpled, very calmly and menacingly training a .40 Smith & Wesson on the space between his eyes.

“What the actual fuck,” Puget said just as calmly, menacingly, and unwaveringly as he held the gun. “Is there a fire I don’t know about, Officer? Were you planning on dragging my unconscious body to safety?” He made no motion to lower his weapon, although he had no intention of discharging it and it was highly unsafe and unprofessional to keep it pointed at his subordinate, even with his finger on the trigger guard. He was an officer of the law and knew very damn well there was no such thing as a safe firearm, even were it safetied—holstered—unloaded. But he had had a very rough yesterday, and fuck if this scenario wasn’t just the absolute worst way he could even _think_ of to wake up.

“I—we didn’t—you—” Pullman warbled, holding his hands up in the air with a look on his face like his bladder was emptying down his leg. Heaving a great sigh, Puget lowered his weapon, flicked the safety back on, and tried to holster it first in his bare armpit and next in the elastic waistband of his Hanes boxer briefs before resigning himself to simply holding it at his side. He fixed Pullman with a glare just as deadly as the loaded gun had been.

If Pullman hadn’t wet himself before, he surely did now. “No one knew where you were,” he said weakly, looking a little faint and also, the detective noticed, casting about for somewhere to rest his eyes that wasn’t Jade’s mostly bare body. Puget sucked in the little padding of gut he’d acquired over the last few years and tried to think of a casual way to cover the trail of short dark hairs that disappeared into his boxers, and crotch region in general. The Smith & Wesson didn’t work, not for casual; he inched closer to his couch, hoping for a throw pillow.

“You didn’t pick up your phone,” Pullman was going on, directing his dizzy, panicky look at the Chairman, who had made his way down the stairs and was flicking his tail in irritation, one ear flattened crossly. “Last anyone had seen, you were getting off duty at the Carson place and—” Pullman quailed under a sharp look from the Chairman. He gazed at the floor instead. “The Chief sent me,” he mumbled at last. The last refuge of the lily-livered: pulling rank.

“Since there is not actually an inferno devouring my home,” Puget said drily, “do you mind if I put on some clothes? Or will you take up the battering ram again if I leave you in the living room?” He was aware that he had not yet spoken a word to Pullman that a 40-year-old man would have. He was not behaving like a seasoned policeman; he was firing off long-suffering sarcastic rejoinders like an Academy-fresh rook at one of his most dependable men, who was in no way capable of defending himself. He was here following orders. He was here trying to figure out where the hell to look, because there was no way he’d be able to take the department’s head detective seriously ever, ever again if he really allowed himself to process the image of Puget, sporting bedhead, in his underpants.

Puget sighed again. He was awake enough now to be ashamed of himself. The only reason Pullman was even here was because he had been flagrantly irresponsible—and not just the incident in the garden. Not showing up at the precinct, not making contact with his superiors, shutting off his phone and barricading himself inside his shitty duplex like it was the sanctum sanctorum of the Detective Jade and The Atomic Chairman super-duo—he’d been behaving like a child. They must have thought he’d been kidnapped or killed because there was absolutely _no_ excuse for a grown man of his position in the force to carry on as he had done in the past 24 hours. _Time to face the day, champ_ , Puget told himself, not without belittlement and disgust. _Game faces, everyone_.

“Of course, sir,” Pullman was saying, still staring miserably at the carpet. “It’s just that—well, we’ve found another body.”

 

* * *

 

Somewhere along the line, the dame had become a stiff.

Burgan took a break from swaying queasily over the red ruin of his femme fatale—the one he had just last night looked into the eyes of and vowed, _you’re safe now_ ; the one he’d said _I’ll see you in the morning_ to and brushed the cheek of with intentions both comforting and borderline salacious; the very first life that had been his to protect, and that he had let down—to sit Indian-style on the carpet, hunch over his folded knees, and hyperventilate.

Her death hadn’t been an easy one. Not quick, not painless—oh, she’d had plenty of time to scream. She’d had eternities to scream. The scene he’d stumbled into—the forced door, frame splintered, had swung so easily for him; had not prepared him for—was a viscid horror. The apartment was a brutal shock of crimson and brown—brown where the spray was thin enough to have dried, crimson where it still hung in heavy, cabernet pools in the sodden carpet. Wynn Wednesday’s throat had not been cut cleanly; she had not been slashed. Instead, she had been stabbed. She had been stabbed again and again, while she screamed and cried and begged and tried to drag herself pathetically, desperately, to safety. To the door. And her attacker had followed, perhaps with a hand looped casually around her ankle to give her a tug back when she got too close; her blood was everywhere. Her soft, sweet front was rent and torn in a thousand places; but she had died facedown, her fingernails bloody and cracked, stuffed with the carpet fibers that had torn away as she’d clawed, clawed, crawled to get away. The stab wounds in her back were more bestial, more frenzied; by the time her throat had been cut, by the time they’d set aside their knife and savagely garroted her, she’d hardly had anything left to bleed. The wound was gummy, her parted lips still dribbling with the blood she’d ultimately drowned in.

Burgan couldn’t believe that none of her neighbors had heard the screams. But they hadn’t helped her.

The smell, the charnel house smell, clogged his nostrils and throat. He couldn’t take his eyes off her, the signs of her thrashing struggle, the obvious agony of her last moments on earth. (It hadn’t taken moments. He knew. It had taken much longer, far too long, for Wynn Wednesday to die. She had suffered for hours, maybe. She had suffered for as long as the pursuit of her screams held her killer’s interest. Only then had she been strangled and left to die gurgling, lungs filling with her own blood.) He had phoned the police, dazedly, and knew it wasn’t in his best interests to be here when they arrived, with her, getting his fingerprints all over her, holding her hand tenderly as if it were a baby bird, so fragile, as if the life could be crushed out of it if he squeezed. But he couldn’t leave her.

He’d left her last night. Left her alone in her tiny apartment in this terrifying building as if a deadbolt and his assurances would be enough to see her through the night, to keep her safe, to hold her life inside her. When he knew it never took very many cuts to let it out. (It didn’t take this many. There was no reason for it to take this many. Goddamn it, what kind of monster made it take so many?)

He hadn’t told her she should bring her concerns to the police. Hadn’t told her they were the ones, really, the only ones who could keep her safe. He hadn’t offered to bring her somewhere safer to spend the night, hadn’t offered to stay. He hadn’t offered a goddamn thing except breakfast—he was going to buy her breakfast in the morning. Together, they were going to decide what she should do. He could’ve told her to go to the police right then, right that moment. He could have told her it was urgent, that she wasn’t imagining the danger, that her life was far more important than Adam Carson’s reputation. She would have listened to him, if he’d insisted. She’d been so scared—scared enough to let him into her home, like a steak knife and pepper spray were a good defense. And he’d taken those out of her hands. She’d laid them down and let him soothe her. She’d been scared enough to listen to him, to do whatever he said. And what had he said? _Don’t worry. Get a good night’s sleep. We’ll figure it out in the morning._

He should have said _you’re powerless. You’re helpless. Anyone who wanted to could waltz in here and cut you into pieces. That’s the way the world is, baby. Nobody’s ever safe. Not me, not you, not anybody._ That would’ve been a good line, wouldn’t it have? That would have been a real fucking noir line for him to deliver. He should have said _get out of here right now and call the police because I can’t help you, I can’t help anybody, and if you listen to my bullshit and put down your pepper spray and try to get some sleep you will die the most horrible death I could possibly imagine._

Instead he had said _you’re safe now_ and left her here to die in the most spectacularly gruesome way there was—helpless, afraid, in pain and screaming—and walked home moodily, admiring his own stern shadow under the streetlights, wondering if he should believe her or not. Well. It didn’t matter now, which had been truth and which lies. It didn’t matter now what she’d lied about or why she’d done it, didn’t matter what her motives had been, if she’d been in on it or the innocent bystander she appeared. It didn’t matter who she had been, the things she had wanted from her life, the things that been most important to her. Her fears, her hopes, her passions. Her dreams. Whether Hunter fucking Burgan believed her or not. None of it mattered now.

Wynn Wednesday was dead. Wynn Wednesday was dead, and it was all his fault.

 

* * *

 

"Was it you?”

Adam looked up from his newspaper at the new arrival, not bothering to disguise his irritation at being interrupted. “Alonso!” he called out just as his harried-looking butler burst into the conservatory. “Alonso, I do believe this one slipped past you.”

Smith Puget, however, was having none of that bullshit. Before Alonso could so much as issue a cold, insistent ‘sir’, the lawyer had strode across the room and torn Carson’s paper out of his hands. Adam wavered between outrage and delighted amusement. “Did you kill Wynn Wednesday,” Puget asked again, voice an orange, seething hiss.

“I don’t think my attorney would want me telling you this,” Adam said primly, one corner of his mouth curling, “but no. I did not. Has someone? Is Wynn Wednesday dead?”

Not satisfied with this response, Puget squeezed his hand into a fist, crumpling a good chunk of Adam’s newspaper within it. “Goddamn it, Carson, this is not a fucking _joke_. It is a not a _game_. It is a fucking MURDER charge and I hope—I _sincerely fucking hope_ —you are capable of understanding the gravity of that.” Puget leaned over the little table and lined up his eyes with Adam’s, who couldn’t help but compare his stare to his brother’s. Their eyes were strikingly similar, their gazes portent with the same solemnity and consequence. Yet, despite their resemblance, Adam found he was not nearly as heeled, nor as captivated, by this set of amber-toned oculars. Still, Puget seemed to think that whatever he was saying was of the gravest importance, so Adam donned a rapt expression.

This particular Puget, however, was not as easily taken in by the manipulation of facial muscles. Smith pushed back off the table angrily and started pacing in circles tight enough to make Adam dizzy watching. “He thinks it’s a joke!” he shouted at Alonso, who looked positively livid at the insurrection of an unannounced guest barging in on Adam’s breakfast. “He thinks it’s a big fucking joke to sit there and smile with the goddamn canary’s feathers hanging out of his mouth and—and _playact_ while I try to keep him out of federal fucking prison!” Smith whirled to a sudden halt and marched back to Adam’s table, jabbing an accusing finger as he did so. “If I did not think you were the guiltiest son of a bitch to ever walk this earth, I would not be wasting my time—which you’re paying a fucking premium for, by the way—on your case at all. Frankly, it hasn’t even been very interesting until this morning. So go ahead. Wow me. Astound me with the details of how you _felt_ when you stabbed Wednesday 47 times, tell me about the _sounds_ she made while she struggled and what color her _lips_ turned while you garroted and her lungs filled up with bile. Tell me how fucking _clever_ you are, how you’re going to get away with it, how brilliantly you schemed to not leave any evidence—regale me. Go ahead. But do NOT—” And suddenly he was shouting again, and jabbing his finger into Adam’s chest, the nerve of which Adam wasn’t even going to get into—“do _not_ get fucking _cute_ and tell me you didn’t do this when everyone in this room knows damn well you did.”

After a pause long enough to make sure Smith was finally through, Alonso cleared his throat and asked disapprovingly, “Are you perhaps under the impression that you’re being paid by the curse word, Mr. Puget?” Alonso had very sound standards of professionalism, and it was obvious by the tone of his voice and the extremely well-bred quiver of his nostrils that he was not impressed with Smith’s.

Normally it was entertainment of the highest degree when Alonso’s feathers were ruffled, but Adam wasn’t enjoying it today. Rather, his face had drained of color and turned a greenish white that was far from hale. He wasn’t smirking now. “Is that what—” he asked before the words caught in his dry mouth and he choked soundlessly. Swallowing hard around his rising gorge he repeated, “Is that what happened to her?” His voice was weaker than he liked it to sound, too much of his real skin showing. Life is a grand game, Adam tried to tell himself, but even the green had dropped away from his face, leaving his skin waxy and grey.

Adam didn’t know he was collapsing until he swam his way back to consciousness through an opaque white fog. He seemed to be laying on the ground; Alonso’s face hovered, one moment very near his own and the next queerly far away, and someone was fanning cool air onto his face, which was slick with icy sweat. “Have I fainted?” he asked Alonso quietly, when he could speak.

“It was all that grisly language, sir,” Alonso assured him, helping him into a sitting position and pressing a glass of water into his limp hand. The world swayed woozily around them. His attorney loomed like a harbinger against background of white haze. “And before you’d even had a proper breakfast! It would,” Alonso pronounced decisively, “have happened to anyone.” The butler turned to fix a glare on Puget, as if defying him to disagree. Puget wisely said nothing.

When the physical properties of the universe at large had resumed normal activity and Adam felt steady enough, he got to his feet, brushing off Alonso’s discreet offer of assistance. He crossed the room to his lawyer as confidently as he could, but he could tell that the mask had been shattered. He was no longer a still, unrippled pool of emotionless charm; Puget was looking at him alarmingly as if he was human.

“Low blood sugar,” he lied crisply, though he knew Puget wouldn’t believe it. A man had his dignity.

Proving he was worth his exorbitant fee, Puget relieved him of the burden of continuing. Instead, he acted as if nothing unusual had happened. “I’ve heard Ms. Wednesday was a lovely woman,” Smith said respectfully. He paused for Adam to incline his head and softly acknowledge that she was before he went on briskly, “We’re in a difficult spot now, you and I. Even though he has yet to produce a single piece of evidence in his original case, my brother is going to do whatever he can to pin Ms. Wednesday’s murder on you, too. And this one—it’s bad. It’s going to turn the public opinion against you. You’ll lose the good will and celebrity you’ve cultivated and it will be replaced with notoriety and outright hatred. So you’re going to want to get out in front of this thing.” Smith checked his watch and ran some mental calculations. “Look—they only found the body thirty, forty minutes ago. Prelim reports are in but nothing’s hit the press yet. Get on the phone immediately. Put together a memorial service, a candlelight vigil, a solemn banquet in her honor; donate to charity in her name, build a monument, get your stricken face on the front page weeping. If your grief hits the cloud at the same time the brutal details do, it might deflect the worst of it.”

Adam nodded numbly along to each of his suggestions. Smith knew that being a criminal lawyer wasn’t about what was said and done in court; it was a PR game. His plans to mobilize were comprehensive, were golden, might even be enough to shift his mother’s murder off his doorstep as well—to make him out as a beleaguered victim in all of this. And God knew it wouldn’t be hard for him to look stricken; Smith would probably issue the press a statement about Adam fainting when he heard the news the moment they parted.

Puget clapped a hand to his shoulder and said, “Hope you have a nice black suit; you’ll need it. Do let me know if you _do_ happen to commit another heinous murder, will you? Makes my job much easier if we communicate about that sort of thing.”

With that, he saw himself out of the conservatory before Alonso could so much as raise an incredulous brow at his presumption. Adam sank heavily back into his seat and stared down at his cold plate of eggs and congealing bacon. She’d been so vibrant and alive, in his arms that night; he couldn’t imagine her cold and torn and dead.

“Shall I start making calls while you—ah—regain your composure?” Alonso inquired delicately from his elbow.  
Adam nodded mechanically, and did not look up.  


End Notes:

I'm aware that 'what the actual fuck' is really not realistic dialogue at all for this Jade, given that he's probably never been on tumblr in his life. But I really love the line for the scenario and think it is comedy of the highest degree, so. I've compromised the accuracy of the character for my own amusement. Totally allowed to do that. Hooray for writing fanfiction! In seriousness, thanks so much for reading. I hope you're enjoying the story!

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=8874>  



	6. Trouble Walked In On 4-Inch Stilettos

“I thought I told you to stay away from my investigation,” Detective Puget said, striding into the interrogation room with a dramatic _bang_ of the door.

‘And I thought I explained pretty clearly that I’m contractually obligated to investigate this case too’ Hunter thought about firing back, but he’d picked up the sinking suspicion that he was poised to be in a hell of a lot of trouble, here, and that the detective’s good graces—hell, how his day was going, the mood he’d woken up in, even the temperature and freshness of his coffee—any damn thing, really—were all that stood between Hunter and a murder sentence. Hunter really, truly, sincerely did not want to be sentenced for murder. Particularly such a terrible, violent one. He talked tough, but he had a soft heart. He didn’t think he’d thrive in prison.

“Technically, Detective, Wynn Wednesday wasn’t being investigated,” he ventured quietly instead, obsequiously, letting Puget know with just his voice that he understood how bad his situation was right now, that he understood he was fully at Puget’s mercy. He showed this in his voice rather than determination or virtue because he hoped acknowledging his total and utter subjugation early might save Puget the trouble of demonstrating it.

“We had a vested interest!” Puget snapped hotly. “She was a _suspect_ in this case, albeit an unlikely one, and a potentially critical witness. And now she turns up dead? And you’re the one to find her? Doesn’t it all strike you as a little _convenient_ , Mr. Burgan?” Hunter bit down on his tongue and any ham-handed defense he might offer. Interrupting now would just make him seem guiltier. “In fact—why should I believe any part of your story? What’s stopping me from assuming that you offed _both_ dames and your whole over-the-top noir PI routine is an act? Or better yet, an elaborate delusion that drives you to kill,” Puget emphasized by pounding his fist on the table to underline key words, “again and again,” (thump, thump), “so that you can play-act at solving murders.”

Hunter could no longer pull of the strong-and-silent routine, and instead said something abominably stupid. “That’s ridiculous.”

Puget froze in his rant, eyeing Hunter like he was a raw piece of meat that had only just caught a lion’s attention. “Is it?” Puget asked. “I’ve had extensive opportunities to talk with Mr. Carson lately, and he has never once mentioned having you in his employ.”

“Why would I call you if I killed her?” The words burst out of Hunter without his consent. He was traumatized, he was sick with guilt and gore, he did not have to take this shit. He was a licensed professional and a law-abiding citizen and this was goddamn _bullshit_. “Your perp seems to be pretty fucking thorough about the evidence he leaves behind! Why would I kill one bird like fucking Houdini and then phone you when I’m covered with the other one’s blood? If you were any kind of detective at all—”

“Delusions, Mr. Burgan. Didn’t I already say delusions?” Puget interrupted, every bit as calm as Hunter was volatile. Puget leaned over the table, putting his face up close to Hunter’s, staring him in the eye. And Hunter read in the detective’s gaze that he wasn’t serious. He wasn’t joking or anything—it wasn’t a lark—but he was more interested in shaking Hunter up, in scaring him a little as punishment for being a nuisance, than in arresting him. This was a threat. He was being threatened. It was posturing, Puget flexing what power he had because this case was making him feel powerless. Puget needed to make someone feel small right now, Hunter guessed, because he needed to feel like he was bigger than just one person—so that he wasn’t the smallest one around.

So Hunter was abashed. Hunter was cowed. Hunter cast his eyes at the table and mumbled pathetically, “I told you, we had an appointment. Her door was broken, just swung open when I knocked. And I—I could smell it. Her. The blood. What was I supposed to do?” He looked up now, and his eyes swam with tears that were real. “Was I supposed to—to leave her there? And call you from a payphone, and disguise my voice? Was I supposed to just wait for one of her neighbors to smell her and call you then? I did what was right. I didn’t kill anyone. I couldn’t leave her. You understand that, don’t you? I told her she’d be safe, and then I left her, and then she—then this happened. So I couldn’t leave her again. It was so horrible.” Hunter stopped speaking abruptly as his voice broke and one of the captive tears slipped down his cheek. He wasn’t playing a part in Puget’s drama. He’d seen a dead woman this morning, he’d held her in his arms, and he was reeling.

Puget sat down in the chair across from him and stared at the tabletop himself. “Yeah, it was, wasn’t it.” He exhaled through his teeth, puffing out his lips. He looked up. He looked tired. Hunter realized that he wasn’t the only one who’d had to be in that room with Wynn. Lots of people had, and a lot had had far worse jobs in there than he had. He wasn’t the only one who needed to go home, pour a stiff drink, and sink into it for a while.

“All right, Burgan,” Puget said after a few moments of silent eye contact. Hunter understood that what the detective was saying was _I know you didn’t kill her_. “What were you and Ms. Wednesday meeting about? Anything you can tell me will—”

“Help the investigation. Of course,” Hunter cut in. He wanted to reach across the table, touch Puget’s hand, say _we’re on the same side. Anything I can do, I will_. But he knew better. Instead, he said, “Well, as you know, Wynn and my client had different stories about what they were doing when Eliza screamed. And my gut told me Carson was telling the truth, and that Wednesday was lying.”

“Your gut or your wallet?” Puget muttered under his breath, but Hunter let that one go. It’d been a long day for both of them, and it wasn’t even time for lunch yet.

“She was.” They were more effective words than ‘shut up’; Puget’s eyes suddenly sharpened, glittering with interest, and his ears pricked up almost comically. “And I wasn’t the only one who knew about it. She’d been getting phone calls, threatening ones, from someone who said he’d kill her if she didn’t tell you the truth.”

“Carson?” Puget asked, voice little more than a hopeful breath.

“Maybe,” Hunter allowed. “She didn’t know. But here’s the thing. The truth—Wynn’s version of the truth—wouldn’t have helped Carson at all. She was with Carson that night. They were upstairs in the bedroom he told you about. They—” Hunter flapped his hand to signify what-have-you. “And then, allegedly, he left.”

Puget’s mouth dropped open in an extremely gratifying manner. “He—left?”

Hunter nodded gravely. “And _then_ she heard the scream.”

Hunter was hoping for a high-five or a grin or any kind of indication of respect for a fellow professional; what he got was even better. Puget flipped open the folder he’d been using, Hunter had noted, as a prop, and began rifling through its contents. Documents and glossy photographs and photocopied reports went sailing through his nimble fingers until he at last pulled out a sheet of thumbnails. He slid it across the table and spun it, so it was facing Hunter. “There,” he said, a little breathless, jabbing at one tiny square in a sea of squares that depicted glitz, glamor, and gore. “That one there. Look at Wednesday.” Hunter obliged, squinting. Eliza Carson’s corpse was the forefront of the picture, but the interesting part of it was the doorway, which framed two fleshy blobs. Hunter wished for a magnifying glass. As if reading his mind, Puget wordlessly slid a worn pair of reading glasses across the table.

Hunter put them on without betraying the glee he felt at being treated like—like an equal. Like a potentially valuable human being. Like a person whose perspective and opinion had merit. (Being a PI wasn’t nearly as romantic or glamorous as the pulps had led him to believe in his misspent youth. He had, at least once, been spat upon after showing his license to a person of interest he only had a few polite questions for.)

Looking closer, he saw that the figures in the doorway were Carson and Wednesday, as he’d already known from descriptions of the scene he’d read in the papers. And it only took a moment to see what Puget was so excited about, why this particular picture hadn’t made it to the front page. Wynn Wednesday was barely dressed. Her dress, the back unzipped, was flopping down her front; she held it up with one hand, but it wasn’t enough. Most of one of her breasts was visible. Her hair was matted up in the back, her lipstick smeared on her mouth. (And seeing that, Hunter wondered why on earth Puget had ever listened to her bullshit about not being with Carson that night. Carson’s clothing was in a similar state of disarray, though a far less sensational one. Had he been so set on Carson’s guilt he’d been willing to ignore discrepancies between witness testimony and actual photographic evidence?)

Hunter looked up from the thumbnails and removed Puget’s glasses slowly, for effect. “If they weren’t together when they heard the scream…” he started.

“Why doesn’t Wednesday have any clothes on?” Puget finished excitedly.

Hunter shook his head slowly, uncomprehending. “She was frightened, Detective, and rightly so. She thought—no. Someone _did_ kill her over what she didn’t tell you. So why would she lie to me about when they were together? Why would she want Carson to look guilty if she knew he wasn’t?”

The thrill of catching a witness in what was almost certainly a lie was wearing off, as it revealed only another knot of unyielding questions. Puget’s brow showed deep lines of puzzlement to mirror Hunter’s own. “If she really was Carson’s alibi, why would he kill her?” Puget mused, ruffling the corners of his pages absent-mindedly. “And if Carson really was with Wednesday when Eliza screamed—if he didn’t kill her—who did?”

“Unless they were in on it together,” Hunter suggested after a long pause.

“Or he knocked Wednesday out before he murdered Eliza,” Puget came back with.

“Or she was with another man and not Carson—”

“Someone innocent who didn’t come running when he heard the scream? Even though the woman he was with did? Maybe she just lounged around naked for a while in someone else’s home during _the_ social event of the season.”

“Or maybe you have the wrong suspect entirely,” Hunter said sagely.

And with that suggestion the best five minutes of Hunter’s entire career came to an abrupt end. Puget looked up at him and scowled, as if realizing who and, his gaze implied, _what_ he was talking to. He snatched the sheet of thumbnails off the table and buried it back in his folder. “I don’t have to tell you again to stay the hell out of my way, do I, Mr. Burgan?” he snarled, voice extremely unkind.

“Are you so unwilling to believe that it’s even _possible_ it wasn’t Carson who did this?” Against his better judgment, Hunter tried pleading with the good, sensible cop locked somewhere inside Puget.

“Why? You got a confession?” Hunter didn’t respond. There was no point. Whatever moment they’d just had was over. Puget had come to his senses and Hunter was trash once again. “Then get the hell out of my interrogation room.”  
Hunter got to his feet, suddenly exhausted, and trudged past Puget, who was holding the door and waiting impatiently to usher him out. “And Burgan,” Puget said as he passed, making Hunter stop and turn back hopefully. “If I catch you anywhere near this case again, _you’re_ my new suspect.”

Hunter hightailed it out of the police station before his day could get any worse.

 

 

* * *

 

 

> Wynn Wednesday’s funeral procession uncoiled through the city this morning like a long, black snake, closing off the main boulevards and busiest streets as it solemnity unwound. Identical town cars were furnished for friends and family, and these sleek black vessels headed up the march; behind them, scores of more colorful and diverse vehicles fell gravely into line, clogging up traffic for miles at some key intersections. The city of San Francisco was uncharacteristically silent: some of the most irate drivers in the world held their tongues, and not their horns, and allowed Ms. Wednesday’s honor guard pass with respect. Hundreds of San Franciscans were late to work as Ms. Wednesday’s coffin, carved of glossy hazel stained as fair as her hair, made its way to her final resting place.
> 
> No one was more moved by the stately procession than Ms. Wednesday’s family. Her mother, face partly obscured by a birdcage of French netting, leaned against her husband at the graveside, weeping openly. Overnight their daughter’s memorial had been raised: an angel, crowned and cloaked by a waterfall of intricately braided flowers, curves its arms and sweeping wings over the plot of earth Ms. Wednesday was laid to rest in this morning. The angel’s marble features are soft and sweet and reminiscent of Wednesday’s own, its eyes seeming to brim with tears as it stares mournfully down at its charge. Ms. Wednesday’s guardian angel was not commissioned by the Wednesday family; its appearance at her burial plot was a surprise to the parents who survived her, and the sight of it overwhelmed most of her mourners with emotion.
> 
> Like the rest of the ceremony and procession, the angel was the first charitable work of the newly formed Wynn Foundation. Adam Carson, chairman and sole benefactor of the Foundation, was not available for comment at the funeral. When I caught him afterwards, he didn’t want to talk about his altruistic motives in establishing the Foundation, which will focus on scholarships and grants for young women seeking education or entrepreneurship in the Bay Area. He wanted to talk about Ms. Wednesday. His eyes were swollen and red and he didn’t quite look at me as his spoke. His skin looked ashen, his face drawn—the face of a man who has suffered too much loss in too short a time.
> 
> “I guess there’s no point in hiding it anymore,” Carson told me hoarsely, looking over my shoulder as if distracted. “Wynn and I had been seeing each other… for about six months now. When I lost my mother… Wynn was helping me get through that. She didn’t want anyone to know about… us. She was worried the press would make her out to be a—a gold-digger.” A brief, pained smile flashed over his lips. “I wouldn’t have cared,” he finished quietly. “Wynn was an incredible woman. I would have given her everything I had if she’d wanted it. I don’t know how I’m going to get through this, without her.”
> 
> Later this evening, Carson is hosting a candlelight vigil for his lost love at his home, a sensitive site as police still have it marked off as a crime scene, although his attorney has repeatedly tried to get the yellow tape and 24-hour sentry lifted from his client’s home. “There is no evidence left to gather,” Smith Puget has gone before numerous judges to plead. “The continued police presence in my client’s home is serving no function but punitive emotional trauma at a very difficult time in his life.”
> 
> When pressed for comment on the matter, Carson has only said, “I support the police in whatever course of action they find necessary. I will assist their investigation any way I can; I just want the person who did this behind bars.” Carson has gone so far as to hire his own freelance investigator to assist in the police’s so-far fruitless search for the perpetrator of these heinous crimes. 

 

 

Davey would be the first to proclaim it a masterful stroke in the campaign to free Adam Carson. He’d dipped his pen in grief and expertly spun the prose into a propaganda piece that distanced Carson not only from Wynn Wednesday’s killing, but Eliza Carson’s as well. It was yet another masterpiece for the Adam Carson Wouldn’t Hurt a Fly Hall of Fame.

It was the fourth such piece of drivel he had composed with intention of publishing in a newspaper, and it was the fourth such piece that would sell out of newsstands across the city, he did not doubt. Adam Carson was the 21st century’s OJ Simpson; the whole of the country was hanging on Davey’s every word. He wished he had something to say for himself.

“This is the second murder I’ve been accused of, now, in just a few short weeks,” he practiced, trying it out. “I’ve got to tell you, Katie Couric, it’s been a whirlwind. One day my life’s being threatened by Adam Carson, who is almost certainly a homicidal psychopath, and the next day I’m writing his defense myself. Oh, no, I wasn’t bribed. Blackmailed? No, I can’t say he blackmailed me either. Threatened to light my whole family on fire one by one until I complied? Again, Katie—and what an imagination you have—I can’t say he did. I guess I’m just Team Adam. I mean, if I could go to prison for him, I would! You caught me. Guilty as charged. That’s my apparently my whole damn plan.”

Davey sneered his frustration into the seat in front of him, snapping his laptop closed and shoving it into his shoulder bag. Only lunatics talk to themselves on the bus, he reminded himself. Only lunatics stage sarcastic Good Morning America interviews at an audible volume in a crowded public space that none of the extremely nervous passengers of are able to escape from.

He was on his way to Carson’s manor—no bus ran all the way there and he was in for a bit of a hike once he’d alienated everyone on board and had been deposited at the curbside with a collective sigh of relief—where he would not actually be receiving a t-shirt that said _Adam’s One-Man PR Machine_ on it. Instead, he’d be taking pictures of the police barricade in Adam’s home, which he thought he could run with his article, since incredibly sympathetic-looking pictures of Adam at the funeral were on every other page of every paper in town. (He’d gotten a fair amount of those too. But by the time his readership reached the continuation page they’d have been inundated by shots of the grave site, the burial, the weeping family and pale-faced lover. Davey had a strong suspicion that Adam’s confession about his relationship with the deceased was a load of crap, though one that no one alive could contest.)

As he’d done every time he’d churned out a piece of pro-Adam drivel, Davey once again asked himself—silently this time—if he believed Carson was innocent, if he believed Carson deserved his help to walk free. If he believed a single word of what he’d written, or if he was just another journalist with giant dollar signs where his integrity should be. With a soft, miserable groan, he rested his head on the seatback in front of him, just in case its occupant was not already thoroughly uncomfortable.

The short answer was, he didn’t know. He’d meant to write skeptical articles from the start, to cast both light and shadow on Carson’s private life and choices. But what he’d seen at the hospital had shaken his conviction of Adam’s guilt on his very first day. He meant to be tough, objective, ruthlessly just—but instead he had met beaming children, weeping parents, raving nurses. If the whole good-guy thing was an act, why had Carson been raising money for this construction and equipping of this incredible state-of-the-art children’s hospital before his mother’s death? And why did he spend so much time there, with the parents and the kids, charming and delighting all of them? Maybe it was an elaborate act, but it was easier for Davey to believe that it was the truth. He’d seen the look on Carson’s face while he’d spoken to little Maisie with the brain tumor, while he’d played with her.

Did he think Carson was innocent? No. Probably not. But did he think he was a decent person, with an all-right soul? Yeah. Yeah, he did think that. He thought that Adam Carson was a basically okay guy who had happened to slaughter his mother like a pig. And as for Wynn Wednesday—maybe Carson had killed her and maybe he hadn’t. But he’d certainly jumped on her death and used it as a press advantage. And that was decidedly slimy. So what was Davey doing with this article?

He was, he realized, being objective. He _was_ writing what he saw.

And if what he saw was going to get a dangerous man exonerated of a crime he most likely did commit, well. Well, shit. He never should have taken this job. There seemed to be pretty good odds it was going to land him in prison.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“So let’s talk about Wynn Wednesday,” Puget announced himself, striding manfully into the ballroom. When he’d seen the POLICE LINE tape split, hanging limp across the door, he knew what he’d find. He didn’t know where his goddamn posted guard was, but he knew Carson would be in the room, and so he was. He didn’t appear to be doing anything suspicious, but Puget knew better than to take that as necessary and sufficient proof. Carson’s back was to him, the man looking out one of the full-length mullioned windows. Carson didn’t jump when Puget spoke, or turn around—the detective got the distinct impression that Carson had been expecting him.

Carson had already been questioned about the Wednesday murder. Puget’s own brother had driven him to the police station, and Jade had let a junior detective handle the interview. He wasn’t interested in putting in an appearance himself, although he watched attentively through the 2-way mirror (unable to shake the feeling that Carson knew he was there). Carson was as cool and collected he had been during his first questioning, and in the end they hadn’t had grounds to hold him without making an arrest. They weren’t going to be able to make another arrest, possibly of anyone, ever, unless they found some goddamn evidence. There was no such thing as a perfect crime; the killer always slipped up. Puget just needed more time to string the pieces together, to sound out the holes in various stories, to untangle some of the knots he’d dug up. But Smith, good old Smith, knew how weak the case against Carson was. He was rushing it to court. Puget only had a few weeks left to put together a really stunning presentation or the judge would laugh the SFPD out of court before they even got there. The people’s case against Carson would be dropped and the murder of Eliza Carson would likely go into the unsolved case files.

This was not good enough for Puget. He _knew_ that Carson was guilty. He couldn’t say how or why; he just had a feeling. Even that private eye had looked at him like he was mad when he revealed how relentlessly he was pursuing that angle. But it was the only thing that made _sense_. Wednesday was dead; Marchand was a hapless kid fresh out of school (though the articles he was writing didn’t make Puget happy at all). It was Carson. It had to be. Jade depended on it.

So here he was. He didn’t really have a plan. He hadn’t really meant to come here, either. He’d gone home, fixed dinner for himself and the cat, laid on his couch with a book and tried to make his eyes focus on the words. But all he could think about was the case. Giving the night’s sleep up as a loss, Puget had gotten dressed again and headed for his office, where he could at least do some work. But instead he’d driven here, in the middle of the night, with some half-assed idea that if he talked to Carson about it—what? He’d confess to both murders? It was too late to start cringing away from why he’d come here.

It was about the kiss.

Puget couldn’t stop thinking about it. He kept replaying it in his head, over and over again—from every angle, every approach. He dissected it, studied its parts, stitched it back together again. He slowed it down, he sped it up, he made it unhappen, he pushed Carson to the ground and fucked him in the dirt. He did it all with distant, detached curiosity, with an eerie coldness, as if it were a scientific study and not an event from his life. He felt no passion, not even a stirring. He calculated it. He studied it scientifically, molecule by molecule. The feel of Carson’s lips, Carson’s teeth, Carson’s tongue. The heavy, insistent push of it, the eager lapping at his mouth, the deep and exploratory nature of their brief contact. The taste of Carson’s blood. It wasn’t what he wanted, wasn’t what he’d ever wanted, was all wrong. Was sick and stupid and wrong.

And he couldn’t get it out of his head.

“Aren’t you going to tell me I can’t be in here?” Carson’s voice was laconic, uncurling from his undoubtedly smirking lips like a purr. He didn’t turn around. He cut quite the figure, outlined by the dim light from the corridor against panes of starry black. His shoulders were broad, his back straight, his exposed neck elegant and vulnerable. He clasped his hands behind his back, showing Puget his pale blue wrists, the untanned underside of his arms, the weak point.

“You can’t be in here,” Puget told him, and took a step towards him.

“Aren’t you going to tell me this is a restricted area and I’m not authorized to be in it?”

“This is a restricted area, and you’re not authorized to be in it.” Another step.

“Aren’t you going to tell me I’m a sick, twisted monster for what I did to Wynn?”

“You’re a sick, twisted monster.” Puget was at Carson’s back now, close enough to see the individual hairs at the nape of Carson’s neck, gold and dewy in the moonlight.

“Aren’t you going to tell me—” Carson’s words died in a drawn breath as he turned around, finding the detective very close to him. He tried to hide his surprise and alarm and failed miserably. The rest of his sentence did not come.

“I’m going to,” Puget promised, and kissed Carson hard, rough, desperate on the mouth.

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=8874>  



	7. The Smoking Gun

After, in the stillness immediately following, they untangled their limbs and Adam stretched himself out on the floor. He’d always liked to do that, to stretch across the ballroom floor like a cat, to let his bones unkink and take the pressure off his spine and lay out across the beautifully detailed wood parquet. The swirls and sunbursts of this floor had made it one of his favorite places to play. The patterns the sunlight cast through mullioned windows were shapes and shadows to chase, and the stray sunbeams would warm his skin as he stretched and rolled through them. He’d loved the smell of the floor, to trace the long and elegant swirls with his fingers or his Matchbox cars, the way the dustcovers on the furniture rustled and let up the smell of upholstery when you ran your fingers along them. He knew the design of the floor, the individual grain and stain of each hand-cut piece of wood, by heart. He knew all its secrets. He’d liked to run and slide along it in his sock feet; remembering, he was tempted to retrieve his socks and try it now. He’d snuck into the ballroom every chance he’d gotten when he was a child.

He was no different as a teenager, when the doors were locked and the memory of his father’s death inside them; he’d learned where his mother hid the key and come in here to drink and smoke and fuck, would stumble in clumsy at the dead of night with a giggling girl or his one-time best friend with a bottle and a condom, would sneak in during the long daylight hours to stretch in the sunlight, watch for patterns in the slow-moving dust, tuck himself into a corner or curl up on a dust-covered loveseat to read.

He was no different now.

He stretched and sighed and let his body relax, the wood chill on his cooling body, then froze at the detective’s unexpected touch. Puget stretched out beside him, careless and brushing against him hip and thigh, elbows knocking. Once settled, the detective let out a small, contented hum. With cautious tenderness, because this was already more kindness than he thought he’d be allowed, Adam reached out and found Puget’s hand in the dark. He brushed his knuckles on the back of Jade’s hand, ran his fingers up and down the length of Jade’s own, hardly breathed while he waited for Jade to pull away. Instead, Puget’s fingers unfurled, responding to Adam’s uncertain touch.

“This is an interesting turn of events.” Adam risked speaking, loading his voice up with artifice and distant amusement that clashed with the gentle curiosity of the movement of his hand. Their skin touched at two points—the hands, and where Adam’s foot rested against Jade’s ankle. Sometimes the movement of his hand would cause the skin of his wrist to brush Jade’s arm, and his body lit up with the contact each time.

If he’d expected the detective to stiffen or pull away when he broke the silence, he was mistaken. Adam, usually so gifted at reading and shaping a situation, found himself powerless in this, the throes of his own discarded game. His body still ached, quivered, burned everywhere they’d touched. The cool air of the room prickled along his naked skin, leaving behind goosebumps. He’d not expected this. It was a gift, one he hadn’t known what to do but accept. If he had prepared—if he’d seen it coming—but he hadn’t. Instead he had folded into Jade’s rough embrace, yielding to the fury of his kiss, fumbled for buttons and zippers with an urgency that surprised them both. And he’d taken Jade into his body eagerly, had buckled beneath him groaning, eyes rolling in ecstasy, had come more quickly and with less dignity than he had since he was a teenager. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt less in control of a situation. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so _good_.

Quite without his permission, Adam’s head turned and nuzzled Jade’s shoulder, neck. It wasn’t a calculated risk, even; it was just a risk. Puget could recoil, could pull away, at any moment. But he didn’t. For all the violence of their union—and Adam knew they’d both be sore in the morning—this moment was one of peace. Of truce. Of surrender.

It would not, he knew, last. It was too fragile, too damn precious. Its own weight would shatter it soon enough, if theirs didn’t first, and he’d be left with a handful of bleeding, burning splinters. With longing and regret. With a badly forfeited advantage. Puget wasn’t just winning; it was a near-flawless victory. Adam was giving the game away. It was like he wasn’t even playing.

“ _Interesting_ is a word,” the detective agreed. Adam could hear the smile in the way his lips brushed against each other. He didn’t dare look. There was enough light, just, to allow for eye contact, for a thorough surveying of the features. He wasn’t ready to give that away. Instead he stole glances out of the corner of his eye. The detective was milky pale underneath his clothes, in the mullioned moonlight, his tan line ludicrous. His eyes took on new shape, new depth, in the darkness, shining reflective like a wolf’s. His frame was long and lean, its trimness making his musculature stand out. Stretched out on his back, his small, soft stomach looked concave, his ribs sharp through the skin. He wore a collection of interesting scars, up to and including what looked like a severe powder burn on his right hand. The muscles on the right side of his body were more pronounced, his shoulder and bicep betraying long hours on the shooting range.

“You’re staring,” Puget breathed in his ear. Adam started at the closeness of the sound, the heat of Puget’s breath. His heartbeat quickened in his chest. He’d begun sweating, small, cold beads slipping down his back, his ass, anywhere his body didn’t touch the floor. _The floor_. There was something to remember about the floor. He slammed back into himself at a screaming velocity and jerked his hand away from Puget, already palming splinters. _Shit! The floor!_

“Here—have a better look.” The detective’s normally stern face was light, relaxed, playful. Adam lunged to stop him but he was too late. Puget had rolled over, stretched out his arm, and punched the switch for the floodlight. The room lit up with searing brightness; they both squeezed their eyes shut reflexively against the glare. But it was ruthless: it showed everything. Their disgraced bodies. Their real faces. The bloodstain. Their new stains. The pulled-up parquet square in the corner of the room. And, beside it, the gore-encrusted knife.

 

* * *

 

And these were not the only things the floodlight illuminated. As Detective Puget’s eyes widened at Carson’s violent reaction, as he twisted around to see what was behind them, as his eyes fell on the floorboards and the knife and near burst out of his head—as the unsolicited nudity of two men who very much ought to always have pants on exploded across his own eyeballs—as a monstrous regiment of emotions (masks) crawled over Carson’s face before he settled on one, which was haughty and cold, and perhaps a little too ambitious considering his current pantslessness—as all hell broke loose in the ballroom, in the case itself, the floodlight’s beams fell across something else too.

Davey backed up slowly, as if he could take it back inch by inch, as if he could unsee it. He crept backwards without making a sound, holding his breath, praying to God and Zeus and Zarathustra they wouldn’t see him. Raising his camera, disengaging the flash. And snapping every photograph he could.

The series started from the end of the hallway, when the ballroom had still been darkened, the police tape flapping uselessly in front of the wide, inviting doorway. As Davey had moved down the hall and edged into the room, he had heard murmurs and rustlings. Tipped off by sharp journalistic/survival instincts, he’d stilled his finger on the shutter. He was in the room with his camera raised, wondering if he dared investigate using the flash—last time he had tried that in this ballroom it hadn’t gone well for him—his career though, _that_ had skyrocketed—when the lights clicked on. Davey, too, was momentarily blinded by the floodlight. But his finger had depressed the shutter, taking advantage of the impromptu flash. This picture showed a very nude Jade Puget of the SFPD, and an equally nude Adam Carson reaching for him. It was, Davey realized as his vision returned to him, a post-coital scene. It was also the thing that would get him killed, if either man saw him. He’d be deader than Wynn Wednesday if either glanced his way.

That’s when he’d started backing away. Only once he was safe in the shadows again did he resume taking pictures. He didn’t know what he’d do with them. He couldn’t make his mind up about anything, these days. He did know they were useful, though. He knew that the photographs might, somehow, keep him alive. (If they didn’t kill him, that is.)

Davey watched in breathless terror as Detective Puget bounded across the room (and yes, every bouncing implication of the word _bounded_ applied) to the knife. And Davey flinched at each syllable when Puget started shouting.

Puget, showing a bit of cleverness that his nudity in the given situation had totally obscured, covered his hand with a discarded article of clothing before reaching for the knife. Davey wondered distantly how long they’d been fucking, if that was why the investigation had stalled.  
But if Carson had felt secure in how his trial would go, he’d hardly have hired Davey. And if Davey wasn’t quite mistaken, Puget was only just now discovering the murder weapon. Either that or this was even more mentally scarring sex than he’d thought it was.

Instead of wrapping the weapon securely in the piece of clothing so as not to disturb any more evidence than he already had, Puget seized it by the handle through an article Davey hoped was a grey undershirt and not boxer shorts, because how on earth would Puget explain evidence-bag boxers (or pubic hairs on the murder weapon! Davey shuddered involuntarily), and began waving it insanely at Carson. Carson, meanwhile, slipped back into his black slacks with a dainty little hop and began calmly doing up the fly. His face was as still and calm as a mirror while Puget’s face screwed up in rage.

“This is the fucking murder weapon, isn’t it!” Puget screamed. His credibility, Davey thought, was a little damaged by his being stark-ass naked. But the anger on his face and in his voice was terrifyingly real. A man didn’t need pants to be intimidating with a yelling voice like that. “You goddamned bastard!”

Carson, one arm now in his shirt, looked up from the buttons draped across his chest with a face that read _Hmm?_. “It appears to be, yes,” he said disinterestedly. “Although isn’t that supposed to be _your_ area of expertise?”

Davey barely stifled an awed whisper of ‘daaaaamn’. He was wasting his time taking pictures; he should be taking notes. Carson was a master.

Puget all but choked on his own tongue in apoplectic fury. “What’s it doing here, Carson?” he demanded, voice dropping from a shout to something much more terrifying: a voice as deadly and controlled as Carson’s own. Instead of playing the bemused angle, Puget opted for ‘seething with barely reigned-in anger’. “Why’s it in your fucking floor?”

“I’m sure you have your own opinions about that. Don’t you, Detective?” asked Carson. Davey couldn’t stop his sharp intake of breath at that one. Never had the word _detective_ been as bitingly dismissive as it was then. Puget, Davey decided, had just been played. The sex was for—for what? Sick, twisted pleasure? Probably. But also, leverage. Sweet golden leverage. The interesting part of the situation—and it was so hard to choose just one—was that Puget had been taken in by it. If Davey had realized batting his eyelashes at the head detective would get him off the hook, he might’ve tried it. He was nubile and young, wasn’t he? He had to be at least as attractive to a closeted policeman as a scheming, 31-year-old sociopath. But then, he had leverage of his own now, didn’t he? Finger bouncing on the shutter, he collected some more.

Puget finally stopped gesturing with the knife as if on the brink of a crime of passion, and instead wrapped it in the undershirt with shaking hands. “Last chance, asshole. Tell me what this is doing here or I’ll be forced to—”

“To what? Assume the worst?” Carson, fully dressed now, had clearly gotten the advantage. Puget was looking more ridiculous by the second in his skivvies. All he had to cover himself with was the oddly-wrapped bundle. Carson put on a saccharine smile, picked up a handful of clothing from the floor, and held it out to the glowering detective. “Are you giving me special treatment because you fucked me, Detective?” When Puget made no move to take the clothes from him, Carson tossed them to the floor at his feet and smirked. “That’s sweet. But I think I should tell you that everyone has.” He paused for effect. If half the rumors Davey heard were justified, it was true. Carson’s reputation as a playboy/whore preceded him even in social circles he’d never stoop to acknowledge. “So don’t go thinking you’re special,” Carson continued, all of the playfulness dropping out of his voice, smirk fading away. He buttoned his cuffs as he continued. “You’re just another body I’ve used for a quick, dirty thrill. I’m dismissing you now, Jade. Get out of my house. Don’t come back without a forensics team. These late-night visits are a little unprofessional.”

Davey ran down the corridor and ducked into the first available shadowy doorway, and only just made it, as Carson turned and strode out of the ballroom, not looking back. If he peered around the doorframe he could just make out the sight of Detective Puget, quivering with rage and probably a fair amount of shame, standing naked in the unforgiving floodlight with his lumpy bundle of evidence, asking himself at what cost.

Davey mentally jotted down the phrase for future use in an article he would never, ever write if he valued his own skin even the most miniscule amount. Then he ducked deeper into the darkened room as Carson continued straight at him down the corridor. Davey ran into some large piece of furniture, tripped gloriously, and hit the ground camera-first a split second before the overhead lights flicked on. He’d tripped over an oak chest at the end of a four-poster bed. Seeing no other choice, Davey army-crawled under the bed as quickly as he was able. There was no time to mourn for his camera; the memory card was probably intact, regardless of what the horrible crunching had been. He was more concerned at this moment for his life, as the bedroom door clicked shut and he found himself cornered and badly concealed, trapped in a room with a murderer.

 

* * *

 

Adam sat down heavily on the edge of the bed, throwing an arm around the bedpost for support. He was breathing so hard it was difficult to distinguish it from hyperventilation. His heart threatened to leap out of his chest and splatter the beautifully wallpapered period walls of what his mother had always called the French Revolution bedroom.

“Shit, fuck, hell,” he cursed under his breath, trying not to actually tear at his hair in frustration and—whatever that sinking feeling was. Very probably despair. His head spun from going in so many circles. What the fuck was going on in his life right now? Yes. Yes. It was stupid of him to have stashed the knife under the floor. Only guilty people did things like that. And yes, it was even stupider of him to take it out and look at it, standing numbly over the Mother-shaped stain on the floor, then going over to place his feet in the worn spot where he’d always stood, the spot where his father’s massive cerebrovascular accident had ended him. Stupidest of all was not stowing it safely away again when he was done brooding, or taking it out to the garden and burying it like he was on his way to do the day he stumbled across Puget snooping around, the day this whole fucking marionette show had started to go off the wires. (Adam started to congratulate himself on his pun and then reminded himself he wasn’t in the mood.)

Scratch that. Stupidest of all had been fucking Jade Puget twenty feet from the place his mother had died, thirteen feet from the place his father had died, fifty feet from the place the murder weapon casually lay. Stupidest of all had been reaching for his _hand_ afterwards, for stroking it with his knuckles and his fingernails and his thumb, for enjoying the size and shape and feel of it, there in the cool darkness. Now the bastard was going to come back in with a whole army of forensic guys, all of whom would probably be flayed for their negligence, and tear up the floor. How could Adam say wait, stop, don’t, my parents died on that floor and I’d like to keep it? They’d cuff him on the spot, and forget warrants for arrest and forget evidence and forget due process, they’d execute him the next morning.

Not to mention what his lawyer was going to say when he heard about this. Adam went ahead and banged his forehead against the bedpost; he felt he deserved it. He could imagine Smith now, the look on his face when he was yelling so very like his brother’s, jabbing his goddamn plebian finger into Adam’s chest like _he_ was the one in a $600 shirt (not to malign Smith’s clothing. Adam subscribed to the same catalogues and would be the first to admit Smith Puget was a sharp dresser.), screaming about how he expected better behavior from his domesticated murderers, and how could Adam be so stupid as to keep the knife on the premises instead of doing something sensible with it, and not want to hear a word about guilty or not guilty because, as he had said repeatedly, it was his solemn duty to make them mean the same thing.

Adam smiled a little, in a very unfunny way, at the thought of what Smith would say if he ever discovered the circumstances under which his brother recovered the murder weapon. Adam was safe on that count, though. Puget wouldn’t be telling anyone about what had happened between them. He’d be too busy down on his knees praying Adam would keep it to himself. After all, Adam was an undeserving, over-privileged layabout scoundrel. He didn’t possess a reputation that could suffer from a tryst with the lead officer on his own case. For Jade, on the other hand, something like this was life-ruining.

Still. Adam found he wasn’t eager for word to get out about it. If anything, laying Puget was a coup; he should be bragging; he should be singing it from the rooftops. He should be calling his pet journalist and obliterating Wynn’s headlines with his own, infinitely more scandalous ones. Any DNA or fingerprint evidence collected from the knife would have to be thrown out of court if the public found out about the kiss in the gardens, let alone the shag in the ballroom. But Adam didn’t feel climbing out onto the roof and singing.

He felt more like crying.

He put his head in his hands and indulged himself, or at least tried to. He hadn’t cried since he was a boy. But all he got were a few dry sobs. He could almost feel the barrier wall in his head, in his throat, that, if broken, would let it all spill out; would relieve so much pressure. Would feel so good. But all he could do was choke, again and again, on the catch in his throat. All he could do was press his palms into his eyes until they watered, trying to feel any damn thing.

Something had happened to him tonight. With the detective. And he didn’t want to sell it, or exploit it, or use it as a piece in a game only he knew the rules to. Instead he wanted to turn back the clock, to undo it, so that he could do it again only with a different ending. Without the lights on, showing their individual nakedness and private shame. It had been better in the dark. They belonged in the dark. The floodlight as much as the knife had shattered everything. How could they look into each other’s eyes after that? After a midnight tenderness neither of them were allowed to feel?

“It wasn’t real,” Adam confirmed with himself. “It was just manipulation. I was using him.” _Like I use everybody_ , he added silently. It sounded good, though his voice wavered in a way he wasn’t comfortable with. He very nearly believed it. There was no one better at playing disaffected cavalier wastrel than he. He had read on Puget’s face how thoroughly the detective had bought it.

All that was left to convince himself.

“I wish that had ended differently.” He said this out loud, too, to try and hear the facets in it, the falseness. For the moment, at least, it rang true. He laid back on the bed, staring at ceiling, and let himself imagine another scenario. One where the lights stayed off, where they lay there in the ballroom and watched clouds pass across the moon through the windows, touching each other with great care. Drawing nearer as they cooled. Adam could rest his head on Jade’s chest, maybe, and Jade could trace his fingers over Adam’s stomach like he was willing prey. They could fall asleep that way, perhaps. And wake to a gentle sunrise, an embarrassed inability to meet each other’s eyes. Adam could offer Jade a shower, a change of clothes; they could dress. Alonso would bring coffee, lots of it, to the conservatory, followed by breakfast. They would drink shyly from their mugs, passing cream and sugar awkwardly, stealing glances. They would slowly find one another’s eyes. They would look into the face of the thing they had done together, gently, as the fragile things they were, and Adam—Adam wouldn’t have to be the way he had been, in the real version. And there wouldn’t have to be a knife, either. Or a murder at all. They could just start as people, and see where it went from there.

“That’s the stupidest thing you’ve done all night,” Adam scolded himself for _that_ nauseating fantasy. That wasn’t who he was, wasn’t what he wanted. He was Adam Carson. He was untouchable. People tried to reach him and they reached right through. It all slipped off of him, sooner or later. He’d do well to remember it. Given time, this error of judgment with the detective would slide off too.

At least he had leverage now.

Adam had no sooner finished thinking it than something under the bed _sneezed_.  


  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=8874>  



	8. A Girl's Got To Have Her Vices

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come one, come all, to the greatest show on earth! I think this is a pretty solid chapter. I don't own the boys and this never happened, which is a shame, because the soundtrack would have been excellent. Please, enjoy!

Davey slapped his hand over his mouth and wished vehemently for death. Maybe Carson was too busy swearing and sobbing to have heard an enormous phantom sneeze rock the goddamn mattress on its springs. Or maybe Davey was about to be the next victim of a godawfully brutal stabbing. If he started now, perhaps it wouldn’t be too late for the detective to hear his screams.

Carson’s feet lifted up and disappeared from the edge of the bed. With a thump his knees hit the ground and before Davey could decide on a course of action, Carson had lifted the bed skirt and was peering straight at him.  
“Fucking hell,” Carson swore, pulling his head out from under the bed and flopping backwards onto the floor, clutching one hand to his chest. “You’d better slither out of there before my heart stops beating entirely.”

Rarely had Davey had an opportunity to feel as abject, as humiliated, as he did now. He had no choice but to employ a kind of slithering movement to inch out from underneath the bed, and hope that Carson wasn’t going to jump on his back and stab him repeatedly while he emerged. Carson refrained, and Davey had no choice from there but to pull himself into a sitting position, knees pulled up into his chest, arms locked protectively around them. He stared at his hands to avoid looking at Carson. He had absolutely no idea what he could possibly say in this situation. It was pretty fucking obvious what he’d seen and done.

Davey heard Carson sit up and scoot closer. He didn’t dare look up. “Let’s go over the part where you’re hiding under a bed, in my home, uninvited, at eleven p.m.” Carson’s voice was very close to Davey’s ear, his breath oddly cool. The skin on the back of Davey’s neck stood up, trying to crawl away.

He made a noise in his throat like he imagined an animal would make in a trap. He wanted to speak, wanted to say anything, to explain himself in any words whatsoever, even if they were the wrong ones. But only the strangled groan came out.

Davey heard Carson wet his lips with his tongue. “David,” he said in a reasonable tone of voice, “I asked you a question.”

“I wanted a picture of the police tape on the ballroom doors,” Davey managed to whisper, voice cracked and hoarse. As soon as he’d said the word he cringed, and squeezed his eyes shut as if in anticipation of a blow. Why had he said ballroom? Why not pretend he’d been poking around in bedrooms? Why as good as tell Carson what he’d seen? He had never felt such overwhelming physical _fear_ before. He was small, defenseless, alone; Adam was the big bad wolf. He was going to be devoured.

Davey’s eyes were closed, his head down; but he could hear Carson’s eyebrows shoot skyward nonetheless. “And did you get any?” Carson asked. There was a note in his voice that could be mistaken for kindness, but Davey, knowing better, recognized the cruelty.

Davey pressed his forehead into his folded arms as hard as he could, willing himself to disappear. He should stand, run, fight. Instead he cowered cowardly and could barely speak. “The tape was torn away,” he whispered. There was burning in his throat that could have been vomit, could have been tears. Could have been fear of violent death, could have been will to live. He couldn’t understand why _these_ words were the ones he was saying, why he couldn’t lie to Carson to save his skin. Something about that voice, about what he’d heard and seen, _compelled_ him to truthfulness. His stomach rolled over with a lurch as he thought about the knife, flaking with gore, that Puget had seized. As he thought about Wynn Wednesday’s autopsy report and imagined what it would feel like, getting stabbed 47 times. How many of them would he feel? Would it hurt the same each time?

“Ah,” said Carson knowingly. His voice moved away from Davey’s ear and Davey cracked open his eyes to see Carson getting to his feet and beginning to pace small circles around the room. “I think I understand. You find yourself in a peculiar position of power and you’re wondering how best to exploit it. If you don’t mind, I’d like to advise you on how to proceed.”

Now that Carson was a few feet away, Davey felt safe and/or ridiculous enough to pick himself up from the floor as well. He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the edge of the bed. He wasn’t feeling casual, but he tried to look it anyway. Since he hadn’t actually pissed himself yet, there was still a marginal chance it he could pull it off. Carson glanced at him and seemed to take his substantially more dignified posture as an indication he was ready to benefit from some sage advice.

Carson steepled his fingers under his chin like an honest-to-god supervillain and spun on his heels so he faced Davey directly. “Start by giving me the camera,” he said in the voice of reasonable suggestion. He held out an expectant palm and, hands shaking violently, Davey did as he was bidden. In a sudden flash of exquisite violence, Carson heaved the thing at the floor and brought his heel down on it furiously, so that its pieces scattered across the floor as it cracked and burst, until there was almost nothing left of it. This he kicked carelessly under the bed.

Then he looked up and smiled calmly, as if he had not just maniacally destroyed a camera. “Next, forget whatever you think you saw. Any stories you might have to tell from this evening are… laughable. And you would regret being made such a laughingstock of, I assure you.” Carson’s lips tugged into a sharp smile. “Finally, it occurs to me that our old agreement is at an end. The terms of your employment at the _Chronicle_ , I’m afraid, are no longer as amicable as they once were. You work for me now, Mr. Marchand. You will submit articles to me for review before your editor receives them, and you will make any changes I require—without complaint, I think.”

Not for the first time in the last month, Davey’s hand flexed around a sweaty memory card, snatched from his camera in the nick of time. Not that he had a camera anymore. (Fuck.) The violent destruction of his most prized possession had not cowed him; it had done the opposite. Carson had crushed the camera, not his fingers or his ribs. He was making it out of here alive. That’s what the display with the camera had been for: to intimidate, to warn. You didn’t bother frightening someone into silence if you were just going to turn around and stab them 47 times.

“Will I be getting a raise, then?” he asked in a dry, borderline sarcastic voice. He had cowered for Carson. He was tired of feeling scared and small. It was a pose his body was too weary to hold any longer. So instead he was bold.

Carson let out a sharp laugh in response. “Oh, very good, Davey,” he praised with what sounded like real pride. “How’s this: I let you leave here tonight with your life, and you do whatever I tell you to until such a time I decide I’m finished with you.”

Davey swallowed harder than he’d wanted to. “Yeah, that sounds good,” he muttered in what he hoped sounded sarcastic and actually was simpering gratitude and acquiescence. _Until such a time I decide I’m finished with you_. Is that what he’d just witnessed with the detective? Carson deciding he was finished, that Puget was used up? Like a cat that batted a mouse around with cruel curiosity until its head was thoroughly dashed or it had died of fright, and grew bored the moment it stopped twitching.

“Good. And Davey?” Carson’s question stopped Davey at the door, where his whole skin tried to squirm off him and his back twitched uncontrollably with the premonition of a knife. “Be a good boy and make an appointment next time.”

It was all Davey could do not to run.

 

* * *

 

There wasn’t a shower in the world hot enough or long enough for this one. Moaning in a vague and disconnected manner, Jade threw the undershirt-wrapped murder weapon on his kitchen table and dragged himself up the stairs.

The Chairman loosed a disgruntled meow as Jade collapsed facedown upon his bed, jostling the cat awake with the impact. Jade moaned in reply. Forget the kitchen knife— _he_ was evidence now. He’d certainly collected a substantial array of DNA samples.

And damn if that hadn’t been one of the finest lays of his life. The act itself had swept over him and dragged him along in its wake. He’d stepped into the ballroom, seen Carson silhouetted in the window, heard his conceited voice—and Jade had been lost. His cock had swollen instantly, knowing something he did not, and he had watched from outside himself as he crossed the room and covered Carson’s mouth with his own. Clothes had fallen away more quickly than reason, then, Carson’s hands roving helplessly over Jade’s body and making short, sharp sounds. Adam had undone Jade’s belt while Jade struggled with his shoulder holster. The gun hit the floor while Jade kicked off his shoes and tangled trousers; Carson’s fingers had fluttered at Jade’s shirt buttons, biting at his neck and bending to cover each new inch of Jade’s chest with lips and tongue as it was exposed. Jade had seized him by the chin and forced his head up again; their lips crashed together like the tide, total and inexorable. Jade’s hands were at work all over Adam’s body, stripping away what clothing remained, when Carson pulled back from his mouth gasping “Please”. Jade’s hands froze, breathing hard and staring into Carson’s cold eyes to see if the next word would be ‘stop’.

It wasn’t. Carson only nodded his head and repeated, “Please”.

“Let me—” Jade managed hoarsely before Carson rocked his hips, covered still by thin silk boxers, grinding against him and obliterating any words he might have spoken.

“ _Yes_ ,” Carson had breathed back before their mouths collided again, and then they had fallen to their knees, Carson bracing his hands on the floor; Jade had wrapped his hands around Adam’s hips and—

“Made a damn fool of myself,” Jade said bitterly into his comforter. His treacherous dick was stirring again at the memory, gods curse the thing. “Got played.” Tricked and trapped like the stupid animal he was. Rutting and grunting on the floor like a reptilian-brained beast. Like he couldn’t control himself. Throwing away the case and his career, his dignity and integrity and goddamn personhood, for what? To give that slippery bastard even more leverage. To give Carson all the ammunition he could possibly need to firebomb the prosecution into obscurity. To give Carson another fine chance to debase and humiliate him.

Jade rolled onto his back, an affront the Chairman could not withstand, and squeezed his palms over his forehead as if he could pulp Carson right out of his brain. Even the cat abandoned him, wanting no part in this bed-jiggling buffet of misery.

He was, Jade felt quite certain, the stupidest man that had ever lived. This was the end of it in any event, the detective resolved. It was only a matter of time until Carson unveiled the sordid story of Jade’s reckless, indiscriminant escapades and pulled his world down around his ears. It was difficult to see a reason why Jade shouldn’t just turn in his badge and his gun right now, and save Carson the trouble of the big reveal.

Jade sat bolt upright on the bed. _His gun_. His goddamn gun. He spasmodically grabbed at the empty space under his armpit as if that would undo it, as if that would erase the crystalline certainty of his leather holster, complete with pistol, on the floor near the big arched windows of Carson’s ballroom, half-obscured by a floor-length velvet curtain. Laying where it had been kicked in his urgent disgrace.

Jade’s whole body turned slowly to ice. His hands grew clammy while his stomach squirmed cold within him. There was no doubt in Jade’s mind that Carson had engineered the situation deliberately, that this was the real and true reason he’d lured Jade into fucking him. (On par with the type of blundering, incompetent detective he had apparently turned into, Jade chose to ignore that _he_ had been the one to show up unannounced at the Carson manor, that even Carson’s smug smirk had turned to shock, then yielded to passion, when Jade kissed him. That Jade had in fact been the one to kiss first on both occasions did not even rank.) Carson had baited him, manipulated him. He’d been in the palm of Carson’s hand all along. It was the only logical explanation of how he’d ended up here, light one sidearm, sabotaging his own investigation, fucking murderers. Like a rookie, he’d let himself be played. In a long career of careful, methodical police work, he had never before let himself be conned, be used, so spectacularly.

Jade felt the jaws of the trap snap shut around him. Carson had fucked him, in more than one meaning of the word, for his gun. He long did he have before another body turned up, this one dead by a .40 bullet with a serial number and ballistic signature matching Jade’s own Smith & Wesson? Carson had given him the murder weapon at the same moment it became impossible for Jade to file it as evidence.

Jade thought, briefly, of reporting his weapon missing—stolen. It was true enough. But how would he explain it? He hadn’t logged a trip to the crime scene, so saying Carson physically overwhelmed him was out. He’d been seen wearing it in the precinct all day, had spent his lunch hour in the basement putting neat holes in the foreheads of paper silhouettes, had requisitioned more rounds after he’d cooled and cleaned the weapon personally. He could claim that he’d been mugged (a trained, seasoned officer of the law, armed, experienced in firefight, driving his own cruiser from the station to his home) or that he he’d been burgled while he slept (you know, while his gun was locked safely in a bedside drawer and a deadbolt, chain, and home security system separated him from the outside world, all with his aforementioned SFPD-spangled, besirened Crown Victoria parked out front), but wouldn’t either of these suspiciously unlikely reports make him seem even guiltier once the body turned up?

 _You could just go to the Chief with what really happened,_ a quiet, sane voice in his brain suggested before it was drowned out by derisive laughter.

No: he had to get the gun back, before Carson had a chance to use it. But he would be careful, this time—would not be compromised again. He’d go in broad daylight, first thing in the morning, on the record. He’d bring not one but two uniformed officers with him, ones he could post at the door to keep Carson away from him, and ones he could use later as witnesses if Carson put even a toe over the line. (He’d have to take the chance that Carson wouldn’t want to waste his coup d’état on a couple of beat cops when he had sensationalist Davey Marchand in his pocket.)

An idea bloomed in Puget’s head as he slid gracefully from shock into crisis protocols: he could bring the knife with. He could put it _back in the floor_. And then, once his holster was buckled back on (if it was still there—the alternative did not bear thinking about. Chances seemed good it would still be where it had fallen, given Carson’s penchant for leaving incriminating weapons laying around in plain sight) he could cry out, as if only now for the first time noticing a floorboard was loose. His back-up would barge into the room; he’d stand back and instruct them to pull up the floorboards he’d ‘felt move’ beneath his feet. He’d have them bag and tag it as evidence and make sure someone else reviewed forensics on it; he wouldn’t go near the thing. Whether he got his weapon back or not, if he stayed well away from the knife and its aura of paperwork, he could preserve the sanctity of the evidence. No matter when Carson and Smith debuted the shocking headline about his and Carson’s affair, the knife would be safe from the flames that consumed him. Clean. It would hold up in court.

The only thing Puget could do was wait. Wait, and hope desperately that Carson would not use his gun tonight.

 

* * *

 

Skulking around Wynn Wednesday’s apartment was one of the least clever things a man in his position could possibly do.

Yet Burgan found himself drawn there, again and again. As if the police tape over the doorway were secure as a padlock, no one had bothered fixing Wynn’s door, and Hunter slipped in and out as he pleased. It was a goddamned cat flap.

The body was gone, but no one had bothered to clean up the blood. It had dried over the past few days, the thickest bits going through bog-like stages on its way to becoming the deep brown carpet-ruining installation it was today. It still sent a dull, coppery smell into the air that made Hunter’s lunch stick in his throat.

While before it had been as vibrant and fluid as life itself, the blood had thickened, turned sticky, then gummy, then finally to flaking crust. (An observation which reminded him: he was off pastries.) Its vital scarlet had faded out into the color of fallen leaves, as dried and dead as Wynn herself.

Hunter was haunted by his failure to save her. It had been his duty, somehow; she’d opened up to him, trusted him in her terror with things she hadn’t dared tell the police. For the hundredth time, Hunter rewound the tape of their first and final interview and played it again. Her voice sounded small and far away, too small to fill the air of even this size room.

Despite what he’d seen in Puget’s picture, Hunter couldn’t believe Wynn had lied to him. He’d felt that she was hiding something, but her confession stunk of truth. Of fear. A dame that frightened wouldn’t lie, not to her knight in shining armor. And that is just what Hunter was supposed to have been. He was meant to save her. Instead he’d let her get killed.

Hunter listened to Wynn’s petrified words for the nth time.

> __  
> I was with him that night. For a while. And then he left, and I was wandering around the house, you know, looking in the rooms—there are some really nice rooms in their house, and that’s when I heard her scream. And I ran down the hall towards the sound. I thought someone was hurt, that I could… help them… And I saw him standing there. Standing over her. Covered in blood.  
> 

He rewound the tape a few seconds and listened again. Her fright had been so on the surface, so _real_. She’d believed she was going to die; maybe she’d felt it, the violence of her murder sending tremors back through time to warn her. To make her fear so sharp, so urgent, so real. Maybe each place her flesh would part under the knife tingled and turned cool, portents in her skin. He’d soothed her then, not feeling it himself. But she knew. She knew that it was the night she died.

As Hunter held and touched and examined her things—the only evidence of her life that remained on earth, or at least what the cops had left behind—he turned the problem over and over in his head. If Wynn had told him the truth, if her withheld testimony would good as put Carson behind bars, Carson would have had a very compelling reason to end her life. Except that she hadn’t been talking. She hadn’t told the police a thing. So Carson wouldn’t have risked another killing unless he had good reason to believe she was going to sing like a bird, and soon. And what would have made him think that? Either Wynn had told him she was going to the cops, maybe in hope of extorting money from him—she certain needed it—or Carson knew she was being threatened. Wynn might even have told him herself, hoping he’d protect her.

Hunter had no difficulty believing that Wynn would neglect to mention a blackmail scheme to him. He _did_ wonder why his client wouldn’t have told him Wynn was receiving threats, if he’d known. Even if Carson planned to turn around and stab her into silence, he’d still want to know who was threatening him, wouldn’t he? Threats against Wynn were really just oblique threats against Carson. In either scenario, Carson was _not_ the caller. If Wynn was telling the truth on Hunter’s tape, it wouldn’t have made any sense for Carson to make those threats.

In scenario B, Hunter assumed Wynn had lied to him and what Puget’s photograph implied was true: Wynn and Carson were together when Eliza Carson screamed, and Carson was provably, if not factually, innocent. (Having an alibi for the time of the scream did not necessarily make Carson innocent. Hell, if Wynn Wednesday was in on it, they could’ve killed the old bird together and then rumpled their clothes. Hunter wasn’t going to make the same mistake the SFPD was making and jump to conclusions based on strong feelings.)

In this scenario Wynn was Carson’s alibi but wasn’t playing ball. For some reason or another—and Hunter guessed it would be her reputation—she didn’t want it getting out that she was involved with Carson. (Not even to help him beat a murder rap—making Carson’s story about their secret relationship ring false, at least to Burgan’s ear.) If that were the case, it made perfect sense that Carson would threaten her. Whether innocent or a criminal mastermind, Carson had it on his agenda to avoid prison. That said, threats were one thing—47 stabbings and a garrote were another. If Wynn could help Carson stay out of prison, he certainly wouldn’t kill her. Not when she was so shaken up she was only hours from going to the police with the truth (whatever that turned out to be).

Scenario B had some flaws in it—both scenarios did—but one in particular stood out to Hunter. Wynn hadn’t known the identity of the person making death threats; just that it was a man. And she knew Carson’s voice. That meant one of three things was true:

 

>   
>  1\. WYNN WAS PROTECTING CARSON’S IDENTITY AS THE CALLER,
> 
> Ruling: Unlikely. She had legitimately wanted Hunter’s protection; he had no doubts about that. She had died terrified because she believed the death threats were real. If she had known who was making them, she’d have said so.
> 
> 2\. CARSON WAS DISGUISING HIS VOICE ON THE PHONE, OR
> 
> Ruling: Also unlikely. It made no sense to threaten Wynn anonymously if she knew damn well exactly who was threatening her—and she would, since Carson would be the only way to directly benefit from her telling this truth to the cops. (The cops themselves and the general public notwithstanding.)
> 
> 3\. CARSON WAS NOT THE CALLER, IN WHICH CASE SCENARIO B COLLAPSED IN ON ITSELF LIKE A BLACK HOLE.
> 
> Ruling: Undecided. If someone who was not Carson cared so deeply about Wynn providing his alibi that they would threaten and then kill her, Hunter could not even begin to speculate on their identity or motives.  
> 

 

Hunter made his way into Wynn’s bedroom, where he sniffed her pillow and rubbed the soft fabrics of her clothes between his fingers before he turned his attention to the task of going through her drawers yet again. From all his obsessive examining of the problem, his meticulous accounting of every angle, only one proof had emerged. If Carson was the caller, he wasn’t the killer. If he was the killer, he wasn’t the caller.

That meant there was someone else involved in the murder of Wynn Wednesday. A third party. An unknown variable. It was enough to make a man’s head spin. He’d puzzled himself into knots and possible derangement over a murder he wasn’t even supposed to be solving. He had a hunch that the murders were linked, but no proof, and no instruction from his client to look into Wynn’s death. He was driving himself mad and couldn’t even bill anyone for it.

Giving up on the drawers, as he’d functionally memorized their contents the first time he went through them, a few days back, Hunter laid down wearily on Wynn’s bed. It still smelled like her. He hadn’t slept much more than an hour a night since she’d been killed; he was too busy lying awake wrenching his thoughts in agonized circles. When he stopped thinking about the case, the image of Wynn’s ruined body and what he’d read in the pilfered coroner’s report filled the space between his eyes and lids with red. If he somehow banished that, the guilt would come, enough of it to drown him. And the only way to hold off the guilt was to focus on solving her murder. So the cycle went, all night long.

He didn’t think Carson had killed her. He didn’t think Wynn had lied to him either, of course, but he didn’t really need to believe it when he’d seen the photograph. Even without the picture, this killing didn’t match Eliza’s at all. The two dames hadn’t had a thing in common at the end but a knife—and it wasn’t even the same knife. The one used on Wynn as much smaller, and came to a point like a dagger or a butterfly knife, nothing like the knife a cook Hunter had spoken to had said was missing from the Carson kitchen, one that by description and rough sketch matched Eliza’s wounds. That left Hunter with Scenario A, in which Carson killed one dame but not the other. That meant Hunter had to find out why Wynn had lied. There was something else going on here, something obvious he was missing. But he was out of ideas. He’d tried everything he could think of, exhausted all his hunches and leads. He didn’t know where to start again.

Giving in to a temptation he thought he’d mastered years ago, Hunter took the ceramic ashtray and pack of Camels off Wynn’s nightstand. Smoking a dead woman’s cigarettes was unsettlingly morbid, but she wasn’t in a position to mind. Besides, he deserved one. And hadn’t he always thought more clearly with a smoke in his hand, tar in his lungs? Maybe a shot of nicotine to the brain would jumpstart this case for him.

Hunter balanced the ashtray on his stomach and examined it. It was in the shape of a winking blue whale, with a raised tail and wide-open ash-filled mouth. If you balanced a lit cigarette in the gap in its teeth, smoke would swirl out the whale’s blowhole. It made Hunter smile in the most painful of ways.

“Who were you, Wynn Wednesday?” he asked the empty room, fumbling open the pack. As he tapped out a very stale Camel, a book of matches fell out of the box and onto his chest. He picked it up numbly and looked at it. It was the same matchbook she’d used the day he met her. It was dark blue with white loopy lettering and a scatter of tiny white stars. It read,

__

  
The Holiday Club  


Hunter could’ve smacked himself upside the head, or maybe shouted with joy. There it was. A lead. A new place to start. A book of matches—of course. There was always a matchbook.

He stood and lit himself a congratulatory cigarette with a flourish, pocketing the matchbook as he filled his lungs. After weighing them in his hands thoughtfully, he took the stale Camels and the blue whale, too. What did he care if the police missed them? They were the ones who left the front door wide open. Besides, Hunter wouldn’t need to come back here again. The matchbook would be enough and, if it was a dead end too, well, he’d gotten everything he could from Wynn’s apartment. There were no answers here—just bloodstains.

He held up the whale, trying on its grin and winking back at it. It was a small enough thing to remember her by, his first real dame, the femme fatale he hadn’t saved, but he had a feeling it would do.

If Wynn Wednesday had lied to him that night, the night she had felt her own murder screaming down the line and speeding breakneck right at her, she had had a reason. A damned good one. And he was going to find out what it was.

Hunter flicked his ash in the whale’s mouth and left Wynn’s apartment for the last time. He left the door open behind him.  


  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=8874>  



	9. None of Us Was a Saint

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey there, cats and kittens! It is midterms and, indignant as I am that as a 23-year-old I still have to take goddamn tests, denial has not made them go away. As such there will be no update next week! Which of course is lucky for me, since it gives you two whole weeks to compose your extremely thoughtful reviews, which will brighten my midterm-addled days considerably. (I could describe my schedule to you but you might not believe me. It is literally not credible. Graduate school, ladies and gentleman: it certainly is a life choice.)

Puget tried to walk into the station like he had a gun and wasn’t afraid to use it. He’d dressed in his plainclothes best, grey suit and dark tie over a crisply pressed white button-down. He’d taken a thorough cold shower, shaved, and picked up coffee on the way in. He felt good enough about his plan to adopt a little strut as he walked to the armory.

There, he requisitioned a 9mm Glock and slid into the monogrammed belt holster he’d brought from home. It had been a gift, long ago, from a lover. To celebrate the same promotion that drove them apart. Puget no longer kept lovers long enough to exchange gifts.

The officer he signed the Glock out from didn’t bat an eyelash at his need to supplement his own sidearm with a very similar model. The Glock was unrivalled for stopping power and that was a fact. Many of the cops he knew considered him outdated for carrying the Smith & Wesson at all. And he knew for a fact that Officer Lynch always carried something extra when he had had bedroom troubles the night before. There was nothing original or surprising about an insecure cop packing a little extra heat in the field.

Comforted by the block of lead on his hip, Puget made his way to his desk to rifle up some files and paperwork to fill his prop briefcase with. He’d grab a few evidence bags too, to assist the miraculous discovery of the knife he was already mentally scripting.

He reached the top of the stairs and stopped short. For a half a second it looked like he was already sitting at his desk. Short brown hair, freckled skin, grey suit. But there was another beast entirely seated behind his desk:

It was his brother.

“Now I’ll have to go home and change,” Puget said flatly, dropping his briefcase on his desk as if it didn’t contain a murder weapon very much pertinent to Smith’s interests.

Smith grinned smoothly in response, without the decency to even pretend he was startled by the clatter of the briefcase and making no move to vacate Puget’s chair. “I don’t think that will be a problem,” he said silkily, looking at Jade’s best suit in a way that made it plain he didn’t think much of it. Smith’s apparently superior outfit included a grey vest and grey tie over a black shirt, which Jade thought was entirely too much grey, but what did he know. Smith seemed to think it was the height of fashion, and maybe it was. Intensive wardrobe analysis was not on Jade’s agenda right now, and never had been.

“Well it’s been great catching up,” Puget prompted. He needed to get into his desk, tag his back-up, and get out of here, but he didn’t dare open the briefcase with Smith sitting there.

Smith smirked. “Are you in a rush, Detective?”

“I am, actually. How perceptive of you. I need to get to my crime scene; one of the forensics guys has some new info that—”

“No he doesn’t,” Smith interrupted, eyes gleaming with self-satisfaction. “I happen to know that that scene hasn’t produced any new information for weeks now. I didn’t stop by just to be disappointed by your sense of style, J. You don’t have a crime scene anymore. I wanted to be the first to tell you. Judge Ware signed the order for me last night, due to—how’d he put it?—a total lack of any evidence in the case whatsoever. I sent Officer Luís home and tore down the police tape myself.” Smith pushed off the desk and sprang to his feet, seemingly oblivious to the comically large anvil that had just dropped from the ceiling onto Jade. “I dropped off your lights on my way in. No more uninvited visits to the Carson homestead for you, big brother.”

The way Smith was speaking—and smiling, that bastard—it was impossible to tell how much he knew. Was he gloating because he’d finally succeeded in getting Puget’s team ejected from Carson’s home? Or because Carson had told him everything and his cronies back at the firm were already building Jade’s crucifix?

But Puget was finding it difficult to care what Smith knew. The crime scene hadn’t been a crime scene when he went there last night, a misapprehension Carson hadn’t bothered to correct—unless he’d assumed the lead detective on the case would know a thing like that the moment it happened, which was very similar to the assumption Puget himself had always held. But it was hard to care about that, too. In fact all he could think about at that moment was weapons.

One, the knife in his briefcase he could neither turn over to forensics nor return to the scene. And two—the gun he had as good as given to Carson, and the poor fucker whose gut it was going to riddle with slugs any minute now.

Were Puget alone, seated behind his desk, he would have opened one of the drawers and vomited in it. Instead, through spectacular force of will, he maintained his composure. “Gee, this is awkward. I was talking about the Wednesday scene. Funny thing about being head detective, I’m usually working on more than one case at a time. Thanks for the personal notification, though. Must be nice to have time for that kind of thing. If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got that whole ghastly murder thing to get to—unless you’ve shut down that crime scene too?”

Smith, whose face had turned sour and grey as his suit, could only open his mouth and close it again.

“No? Excellent. I’ll be seeing you.” Puget accompanied the last bit with a cheery wave, grabbing the briefcase and hightailing it down the stairs before Smith would muster a biting rejoinder. He found he enjoyed being the one to fire off a smart comment and sail away, which was a tremendous comfort considering he’d just imperiled not only his career, reputation, and livelihood but also some random innocent’s life, and lost access to an ever-so-slightly crucial crime scene while he was at it. Oh yes, thanks to a few snotty quips directed at his brother, it was shaping up to be a red letter day.

Puget vomited into the first trash can he passed before letting himself into the file room and have a nice, self-congratulatory nervous breakdown.

 

* * *

 

 __  
Dames. It was always dames.

On a night when the rain comes down like the wrath of God and the wind howls like it’s lost a lover, on a night when lightning scars the sky like a writhing live wire, painting the streets brighter than day—when the thunder shakes the foundations and rattles the windows of every building on the block—when the water rises in the streets, clogging the gutters with leaves and trash and cast-off dreams—on a night the only sane thing to do is stay at home in your bed. Those are the nights you’ll find me in the streets, risking everything for the sake of some dame I barely knew.

The dame changes, season to season, storm to storm. But I never do.

The rain was coming down so hard that night it was a wonder he wasn’t washed away like the rest of the refuse. The brim of his hat acted like a spout, collecting rainfall and directing a steady stream of it down the neck of his coat. He could barely make out the red neon sign; but whether it was The Holiday Club or an opium den, he was going inside. Only a madman would stay out in this weather.

A deafening roar of thunder, chased by a blast of lightning, sounded as he swung open the door. He was silhouetted on the threshold by the lightning before he crossed it.

Hunter removed his rainwater-bowl of a hat as the door swung closed behind him and assessed the situation. The club was almost empty—like he’d said, only earthly thing could drive a man from his bed on a night like this was a dame—save for a few men at the bar and just such a dame and her beau at one of the small round tables. As his eyes adjusted to the smoky dimness he also noted a figure at a shadowy corner table up near the stage.

On the stage was the loveliest dame he’d ever seen. Forget the weather; this place should be packed. Once he’d set eyes on her he couldn’t tear them away.

Skin like caramel was set off by the gleaming ultramarine satin she was poured into. The dress fit her like it had been made for her—like it had been made _on_ her—like it caressed every inch of her with its cool, whispering touch, palming her breasts and ass like a lover’s hands. Hunter’s own hands tingled at the thought. They weren’t all that tingled.

The dress fell to her ankles but was slit high enough on the leg to show a lacy hint of garter. Her breasts burst from its low neckline in glowing, perfect mounds, like something a child would sculpt in the snow. If you could get past the cleavage—and who would want to—he’d write sonnets about it if his hands weren’t too sweaty to hold a pen—her face would knock you right back on your ass. (And hell. Her _ass_.) She had a sharp chin, high, crisp cheekbones, big red lips that glistened while she sang, eyes the exact impossible blue of her dress made smoky and elusive by endless curled lashes. Her teeth, big and white, flashed sometimes as those lips moved; and every so often he saw the flash of her agonizingly pink tongue. Her hair was a sleek black helmet cut short as a boy’s, not a strand out of place; heavy blue jewels gleamed at her earlobes.

She was a dame to kill for.

You could have knocked Burgan over with a feather. He’d never been so dazzled. But then, there’d never been a dame like this one.

Her voice was low, hoarse, sultry; she rolled it lazily across her tongue like the siren she was. When her song ended she picked up her dwindling cigarette, put it to her lips, and took a drag so slowly and intimately Hunter would’ve traded his life to be the smoke so lovingly inhaled and then left to uncurl languorously from her parted lips. As she turned and walked from the stage, she rolled her wide hips, the satin shifting and shining over that prodigiously round ass.

Noting that his mouth was wide enough to catch not just flies but also moderately-sized rodents in, Hunter closed it and gulped, realizing for the first time he might be in over his head.

Once he’d regained locomotive control of his legs, Hunter shuffled weakly to the bar. It was all he could do to collapse onto one of the stools. He laid his sopping hat on the bar beside him and croaked, “I think I need a drink.”

The barkeep looked up from wiping the counter with a toothy smile. He was a much older man, and seemed never to have thought much of oral hygiene or dentistry; the grin only barely counted as ‘toothy’ and not ‘reminiscent of teeth’. “Poor sap,” the man chuckled, dropping a snifter in front of Hunter and filling it with a long pour from an amber bottle. “First time catching the floor show?” Hunter nodded blearily and the barkeep dropped a shot glass he’d filled with clear liquid into the snifter and instructed, “Drink this, it’ll help.”

Hunter tossed it back almost—almost—without tasting it, which turned out to be a good move. He choked on the last bit of it that hit his tongue. His throat burned like he’d just drunk drain cleaner and it hit him like a punch to the brain a moment after the glass touched the bar.

“Good God,” Hunter said with a shudder. “What _is_ that? Gasoline?”

“The only thing for it,” the barkeep said sagely. “Pure grain alcohol in the blackest, hairiest whiskey a fella can buy. I call ‘em whiskey gins, though, for the sake of smart-mouthed fellas who don’t really want to know what it is they’re drinkin’. As for your next question, she’s the boss's girl and if you’re smart that’s all you need to know.”

“What’s her name?” Hunter asked moonily. His wits, at least a few of them, had been violently restored by the foul drink. Not so many that he was going to take the barkeep’s advice, but enough that he thought he could breathe on his own again. (Hadn’t he read somewhere that pure grain alcohol was essentially evil-tasting poison?)

“Lenore Cotreau,” a husky voice purred in his ear. He about fainted as she slipped her warm brown arm through his own. “What’s yours?”

“I’ll take another,” Hunter managed to gasp to the barkeep before she pulled him off the stool and towards an alarmingly cozy-looking booth.

The bartender brought him a double, as well as a tall flute of champagne for Lenore, as soon as they were settled. She asked Hunter to light her cigarette and he broke two matches before he got one lit. She laughed marvelously, a laugh he could feel on his skin, both times. It did not ease his nerves. When he reached for a fresh matchbook to light his own, she plucked it from his shaking hand and lit it with her own, drawing air in slowly to kindle the flame and returning it to him ringed faintly in lipstick. It was the sexiest thing he’d ever seen.

“Don’t mind Mickey,” she purred in her rich, incredible voice after the barkeep had tottered away and their smokes were both lit. Hunter closed his eyes and took a large, fiery gulp of his drink, hoping to clear his head. It worked only until he opened his eyes and Lenore was still staring at him like she hadn’t decided yet if she should bat him around a while longer or just devour him on the spot. “He just can’t stand me having any fun. Now you’re new, sugar. What brought you to the Holiday on a night like this?”

“A dame,” he answered dumbly. His mouth filled with the taste of tobacco and her lipstick. It had been easier to swallow the gasoline-flavored whiskey gin.

“She must be some dame,” Lenore said teasingly, arcing one perfect black brow. “Where is she?”

“She’s dead,” Hunter blurted, much too loudly for such an empty place. He didn’t know what was wrong with him. He was acting like he’d never seen a beautiful woman before. But then, he hadn’t. He’d only thought they were beautiful because he’d never seen Lenore. She was a goddess.

The goddess’s coy smile and attending dimple vanished at his words. She took a long pull from her champagne flute and some of the lovely rosiness left her cheeks.

“She had this,” Hunter blundered on, holding up the spent matchbook. “So I came here.”

Lenore’s smile was much brighter and more artificial now. “Hardly the only one in existence, though,” she said, gesturing at the bowl of matchbooks on their table. “Did you like my song?” she asked in a patent attempt to change the subject. Hunter had enough wits left to see that she knew something, though not enough to pursue it tactfully.

He tossed back as much of his drink as he could swallow and pressed, “She was a nice girl. Name of Wynn Wednesday. Here, I’ve got her picture—maybe you can tell me if you’ve seen her around?” He reached for his wallet to get Wynn’s snapshot but Lenore grabbed his arm before he could, eyes wide.

“Walls have ears, sugar,” she hissed sharply, gesturing with her eyes to the shadowy figure across the room at the corner table. “But I ain’t seen your girl, okay? I’m real sorry she died but you gotta be careful who you mess around with, you hear me? Get involved in something too big for you and—” Lenore drew a finger across her pretty throat and then made like she’d been brushing away a stray bit of lint or hair that had landed on her ponderous bosom.

Hunter at last took the hint. This bird wasn’t going to be strong-armed into singing. He wasn’t letting it go—not by a long shot—but he didn’t want to endanger yet another broad by making the wrong calls, either. He finished the whiskey turpentine with a grimace and asked, leering and affecting a slur, “S’there anywhere we can go, honey? Like t’get to know you better.” He waggled his eyebrows as lewdly as one could.

“My dressing room, five minutes. I’ll leave the fire door open,” Lenore whispered out the corner of her mouth right before she shouted, “Pig!” and threw her drink in his face.

 

 

Hunter found the door in the alley easily enough, once he’d mopped the champagne out of his eyes with his hat. He’d made a big show of stumbling out of the club in a rage without paying, Mickey hobbling after him yelling “And don’t come back, you scoundrel!” He felt bad about that—Mickey seemed like a fine gentleman whose acquaintance he was glad to have made. Under any other circumstances, the Holiday Club seemed like exactly his type of haunt.

The fire door led him into a dark, narrow hallways with all the cables and ropes and disused rubbish—fire hazards, all of them, and more than enough to break a man’s neck in the dark like this—of a passage behind a stage. He went the only way he could down the hall until he spied a thin strip of light under a door with a peeling yellow star pasted to it. He crept up to it, prepared to knock, when he heard voices inside.

“—last thing I need is some prick coming in here asking questions!” a man was shouting.

“I know, baby, I would never—” Lenore’s voice sounded rattled, an edge of hysteria creeping into it. Every instinct Hunter had screamed at him to charge in the door, to her rescue. But lately it seemed like when he tried to rescue a dame she got dead instead. So he somehow stilled himself, waiting it out. Anyway, Lenore seemed like kind of dame who could handle herself. He didn’t think the situation was out of her control.

“What did you tell him? How much did he know?”

“I don’t know, just some girl he knew died and I—I got rid of him, didn’t I? I don’t think he knows anything, I think he just—maybe he was talking about somebody else.”

“Somebody—? How many dead girls are there with your matchbooks, huh? How many—?”

“Baby, you’re not _listening_. I think it was just some girl he knew. Like a girlfriend, or a wife. He said I reminded him of her, you know? So it couldn’t have been that twiggy blond bitch. He was just hitting on me. He woulda said anything.”

“Damn right he would,” the man replied, apparently placated. For some time after all Hunter could hear from the room were soft wet noises and Lenore’s resonant giggle. Hunter hid behind a few stacked boxes when the man left her room. He didn’t get a good look at him.

He stayed in his hiding spot until Lenore leaned out of the room in a pink floral robe and whispered, “You here, sugar?”

When he entered the room, she was already seated at a dressing table, examining her neck in the mirror. “Ugh, I think it’s gonna be a hickey,” she said distractedly. “Get me some ice from the little fridge over there, will ya? I keep telling him he can’t leave hickeys.”

Hunter fetched a handful of ice from the freezer shelf in her minifridge. Lenore wrapped them in a washcloth and pressed them to her neck before she turned to face him. She had the same effect on him in the robe as she had in the dress, maybe even more of one. He was close enough to smell her.

“Is he your boss?” Hunter asked, trying to ignore the burgeoning pants situation and reminding himself he was a grown-ass man goddamnit, thinking back to what Mickey had said. “Taking liberties?”

Lenore dismissed this notion with a wave of her small hand. Her fingernails were filed into long smooth ovals, the skin beneath showing pink and pale in contrast to the rest of her gold-brown body. “Nothing like that. He buys me things, takes me out sometimes, likes to watch me sing—but nothing I don’t want to do, you understand. Mickey owns the bar. This guy’s just a friend. From work, you know.”

“He got a name?” Hunter tried, pushing his luck, but Lenore’s beautiful eyes narrowed in annoyance.

“I didn’t let you back here to talk about him,” she said, frowning. “I let you back here because you seem sweet and a little lost, and because you woulda got yourself in a whole lot of trouble asking your questions out there where anyone can hear you.”

Hunter couldn’t help but feel disappointed, in spite of being two feet from a stunning dame who smelled like nutmeg wearing only her bathrobe. The man she’d been fighting with, whoever he was—that was exactly who he had business with, and he didn’t much care how much trouble he got into pursuing it. That was a man who knew something about Wynn’s death, who could answer his questions. Lenore was just a foil—a red herring. But she could get him to that man whether she wanted to or not. Hunter had a feel for men like the one who’d just left. There was always one good way to get their attention: take something they thought belonged to them. Then you didn’t have to look for them. They’d come to you.

It was as good a reason as any to get lost in her.

“That’s not why you let me back here, either,” Hunter said, grinning, and leaned down to kiss her waiting lips.

 

* * *

 

It was, Adam thought, rather impressive he’d held out this long. Three days after he had routed Marchand, an unexpected new enemy, from the house, three days since the detective had stumbled haplessly into his convoluted web, and he just couldn’t wait a moment longer.

He had to see the pictures.

Like picking a scab, like scratching a fresh wound, like prodding at a bruise—like slapping a sunburn—there are certain urges you can only resist for so long before you give in to them, though you know they’ll only hurt you.

If it hadn’t been an astonishingly stupid, ineffective bluff, Marchand had captured on film the shattering. The moment it all fell apart. For some brittle, masochistic reason he could not name, Adam had to see them. Had to see hurt, bewilderment, betrayal and then scorn close off the detective’s face once more. Had to see how pathetic and fleshy and ugly their bodies became, in the floodlight, in the reality, where they were only meat and not men. Dumb, rutting _meat_. Adam needed to see the madness on Puget’s face as he waved the knife and the smugness on his own as he coldly ignored it, dressing himself with precise, economical movements.

It was because of their value as a tool for blackmail. That he needed to see them. It was so he knew what kind of firepower he had. It was unwise to carry a gun around when one did not even know if it was loaded. So he needed to retrieve this new deck of trump cards from Marchand’s camera. He regretted crushing it so thoroughly. If anyone still used film nowadays, the photos would have been destroyed forever. SD cards, however, were miniscule. Most of their size was empty plastic. The functional components were too small for big, clumsy consumer hands to handle.

At the time, of course, he’d meant to destroy it all. He wasn’t stupid. He’d know he’d be tempted. But he was fuzzier now on why exactly he shouldn’t have the photographs. They solidified his position of already considerable power in this dangerous investigation. They held up his throne. If they were anywhere near as incriminating as Marchand had indicated, just one would be enough to crumble Puget’s entire case against Adam, Puget’s entire career. Just one could _end_ him. Could, most importantly of all, dissolve that knife surer than leaving it overnight in a vat of Coca-Cola syrup could.

Although the knife puzzled him some. Since the moment Puget had taken it up—or at least the moment it became apparent he wasn’t actually going to use it cleave Adam in twain—Adam had been waiting for his attorney to ream him out about it. For the prosecution to snidely submit it to the judge and give the trial a leg to stand on. (At the moment, no matter what the SFPD’s official stance might be, all evidence or lack thereof implicated some mysterious thug who had fled the scene, taking the weapon and every other trace of evidence with him, long before any of the suspect-witnesses had arrived.)

He’d been waiting for the police to log it as a piece of evidence and show up on his doorstep with shackles.

He was still waiting.

There were two truths Adam was certain of: that Puget despised him, and that Puget believed beyond all doubt that Adam was a guilty as Lady Macbeth. So why hadn’t he gotten word from one of many inside contacts that the knife had been submitted as evidence? Either Puget was playing this one close to the chest or—and Adam didn’t know which was harder to believe—he hadn’t turned over the knife yet.

(Because why wouldn’t he? The guiltier Puget made him look, the more astronomical the odds of anyone believing Carson’s claims of a compromising sexual indiscretion grew. Puget couldn’t know Adam had proof, could he? Unless Davey had squealed.)

All the more reason, Adam concluded, to take inventory of his photographic arsenal.

The camera’s remains, he quickly discovered, were nowhere to be found. (Which at least answered the age-old question of whether or not his maids really cleaned rooms that were not in use. He’d always assumed they did not, and paid them for it anyway.) His heart dropped quickly through his chest as he pulled up the rug, rooted through the chest of drawers, checked corners and under the bed for any trace of the shrapnel. They’d have thrown it away, he knew. It looked like trash and he’d left it scattered in pieces on the floor like trash. Of course they’d have thrown it away. Adam allowed himself a short shouted curse.

“Are you looking for something, sir?” Alonso asked from the doorway. Adam hadn’t heard him approach but he did always seem to linger within shouting distance, so as to respond promptly to Adam’s every need. Adam theorized he materialized like this, without so much as a heavy footstep, strictly to be unsettling. It was the business of butlers to be just a little bit eerie.

“I am,” Adam allowed, getting to his feet and brushing off his knees.

“The—ah—remains of Mr. Marchand’s equipment, perhaps?” Alonso’s expression was as delightful and composed as ever, though Adam’s face plainly showed surprise. _Alonso knows everything that happens in this house_ , Adam thought, and let it sink in. For the first time he regarded his chief of staff like the liability he was. It was a cold, unpleasant feeling.

“Not much gets by you, does it,” Adam said mechanically, meaning to sound amicable and light as he sized up a new threat.

“Almost nothing at all, sir,” Alonso replied with a cheerless smile. Something cold slithered down Adam’s spine. Looking over his shoulder even in his own home was not a hobby he wanted to take up. “I saved the pieces,” he added helpfully. “I thought you might require them eventually.”

Adam stared at Alonso in open distrust for the first time he could remember. It occurred to him how very at Alonso’s mercy he was. The man brought him his food, had access to every part of the house, oversaw all his comings and goings, met his every request. He’d been trusting Alonso with his life for longer than he could recall, whether he’d realized it or not.

“Shall I bring them to you?” Alonso prompted innocuously.  
“Yes,” Adam said at last, wiping his emotions of his face before he gave Alonso reason to suspect him of suspecting Alonso. Distrusting your own butler, he was quickly reaching the conclusion, was too much damn work. You’d have to have two heads to have time for all the narrowed eyes and surreptitious glances. “Thank you, Alonso. I’ll receive them in my study.”

Adam headed to his study to clear his head and wait. There was a very large, grand library on the first floor that would have suited the master of the house nicely, but Adam preferred his warren of a room on the third floor, with the sloping walls of a gabled roof and a dusty roll-top desk that concealed a world of treasures in its apothecary drawers, or had seemed to when he was a boy. He settled into a cracked leather armchair, the arms of which foamed with spilling stuffing, and tried to put his sudden uneasiness behind him. What did it matter if Alonso knew all his secrets? The elderly butler had never given Adam reason to doubt his loyalty or worth. He had enough troubles right now without looking for more. When you’ve climbed up a tree to escape from an enraged alligator, it is already too late to start worrying about poison oak.

Still, Adam felt his skin prickle when Alonso came into the room bearing a silver tray not long afterward. On the tray rested a tangle of crushed electronics and a taped manila envelope.

“What’s this?” Adam asked even as he took the largest surviving piece of camera off the tray and laid in on his desktop, beneath the light.

“It came for you today, sir,” replied Alonso, balancing the tray on a precariously book-laden end table. Partial to the clutter, Adam had never allowed much more than a light dusting and the occasional removal of plates from the room. “Is there anything else?”

Adam wasn’t listening. Remarkably enough, the small slot behind the battery chamber was more or less intact. Adam could tell by the tiny copper plates that the flash card usually nestled within it. Adam turned to the tray and began pawing through the other shards. None were memory cards. None were even the splintered remains of a memory card.

“Shit!” Adam swore to the otherwise empty room. Davey had tricked him. He must have pocketed the card before Adam even found him lurking under the bed. Adam had been a fool not to check before he let Davey go.

His eyes slid from the refuse in his hands to the taped-up envelope. It was not postmarked or addressed; it must have been hand-delivered. He had a sudden premonition that he knew exactly what he’d find within it. Adam shook the envelope so its contents fell to the bottom and tore it in half just below the thick band of packing tape. Then he spilled the envelope’s contents onto the tray.

A single large photograph slid out. It had been chosen carefully, to be effective as a threat without being of any use to Adam. It showed himself and the detective the moment the lights came up. They were fully naked and hip-to-hip. Puget was twisted away from the camera, pulling back from the switch on the floodlight’s cord, covering his eyes with his arm. His face was totally obscured. Adam was semi-recognizable, with his eyes wrinkled shut and his mouth open as he shouted to stop Puget, a moment too late. If he hadn’t been there himself all Adam would have been able to say about its subject was that it was two naked men, looking as if they’d recently fucked, and a very bright light. It sent a powerful message.

Davey, however, had wanted to be crystal clear. Adam flipped over the picture and read, in messy, spidery cursive,

 

> __  
> If anything happens to me, these pictures and a summary of that night and the threats you made against me find their way to Puget’s desk.
> 
> From now on I write whatever the hell I want.
> 
> Your move. 

Adam’s first instinct was to tear the photo to shreds and possibly eat them, but he stopped himself. Unless Alonso also went through his excrement for things that might still be of use to him, he’d end up regretting it. Anything that served to threaten him would serve to threaten Puget, too. The detective wouldn’t know Carson only had this one photo.

“Thank you, Davey, for the handsome gift,” Adam murmured to himself, sliding the picture back into its envelope.  


  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=8874>  



	10. The Night Was Hot As Hell

>   
>  **ADAM CARSON: GUILTY** __  
> 

__

>   
>  For quite a few weeks now I have been appealing to all of you to see another side of Adam Carson—not the man skulking beneath headlines like this one, not the man with hands bloodier than Lady Macbeth, but the man who has dedicated his life to charitable causes, who makes nurses’ hearts flutter, who learned how to make balloon animals to delight sick children, who gives transparently and selflessly of himself to those who are in need, who lost a mother and a lover this month while the world watched, hurling accusations at him.
> 
> I showed you this side of Adam Carson because he is soon to be tried for murder. I showed you this side of Adam Carson because no one else would. I showed you this side of Adam Carson so that you might decide for yourself the matter of his innocence—or guilt.
> 
> I showed you this side of Adam Carson because he threatened to kill me if I did not.
> 
> But I will not be threatened into silence any longer.
> 
> I have given Carson the benefit of the doubt in this column for weeks. Now I ask that you do the same for me. I have been accused of the same murder that Carson has, and as the intrepid police force has failed to uncover any evidence whatsoever, it has looked like the sentencing of the upcoming trial would be left to a coin flip. Let me put your minds at ease, however, ladies and gentlemen: I am not a murderer. I arrived in a pitch-black ballroom after following the sound of a woman’s dying scream up a back staircase; in an attempt to see, I took three photographs. They show the body, and they show Carson and Wednesday—already on the scene. I am but the eyes and ears of the media. In the grisly murder of Eliza Carson, I played the part of post-mortem observer.
> 
> It was Adam Carson who played the part of killer.
> 
> How convenient, then, that Wednesday was the next to turn up dead—after she failed to give Carson an alibi, that is. Carson has been claiming to the police all along that he was with Wednesday when he heard his mother scream; Wednesday denied this. It was the last thing she ever did. Will my body be the next one the police find? Will my murder be the next horrific case they bungle?
> 
> If Carson has his way, it will be. I am using you as a shield, dear readers. If I am found dead, take it as an admission of guilt on Carson’s part. If I am wrong, if he is not guilty, he will have no need to silence me. There is comfort and security in innocence, in knowing that the truth will out.
> 
> For every word I have written to convince you otherwise, dear readers, you had the right of it all along. Justice is black and white. Guilt and innocence. And no matter what else Carson is—philanthropist, bereaved son, cancer ward clown—he is guilty. The police force is under his sway and in his pocket. The judges have been charmed by his team of lawyers, and the jury has been warmed to him by own duplicitous words. He will not be brought to justice unless we, the people, rally. Let your voices be heard! Adam Carson is guilty. Together, we can put the beast behind bars.

 

 

Davey’s hands shook so that he could barely type Ctrl + P after he finished his article. He danced impatiently in front of the printer as it churned out his request. He hadn’t saved a copy on the _Chronicle_ network. He didn’t even feel safe enough to write the thing at home. Once again, it was not the article he wished he had written.

Hand-delivering it to his editor seemed the only way to go on this one. He didn’t even know if he could trust the editor, really. And if Carson found out about this article before it went to press, well, Davey was a dead man. He checked the minute hand on his watch. It was quarter to deadline. As soon as the printer had spit it out, Davey folded the article with three crisp creases and tried to tell himself it wasn’t his own death warrant. His hands were sweating so much he worried he’d smear the ink.

He hadn’t wanted to write something like this. Hadn’t wanted to paint a target on his back. But it seemed like he had so few choices. Carson had made an explicit threat against his life, and he’d pocketed the memory card—which seemed to be his new go-to move in situations of extreme personal danger—and he was taking a stand. After what he’d seen, he knew the police wouldn’t be able to keep him safe. Carson had said some pretty scathing things to Detective Puget, but that didn’t mean Puget wasn’t still on his side. Maybe Puget would shoot Davey to death just to curry favor with Carson. It seemed unlikely, of course, but what did Davey know about crazy people and how they operated? They were unpredictable. That was the whole point. And, although Davey himself had been taken in by Carson in a different way and entered an unsavory agreement on his own, he did not doubt for one moment that Detective Puget was crazy. Sane people just didn’t stick their hands in blazing infernos for fun, to see what would happen. They didn’t stick their dicks in either.

It was a gamble, but Davey thought that this article would keep him safe. Carson couldn’t murder him after Davey had exposed his plan so publicly, right? Like he’d written, it’d basically be an admission of guilt if Davey turned up dead. It didn’t matter then if Carson was proven guilty for the other murders. One life sentence would be enough to put him in prison forever, no matter how charming or wealthy he was. He didn’t think Carson would risk that.

Of course, that still didn’t mean he’d be going back to his apartment anytime soon. Or ever again. He wasn’t stupid. Well, okay, he was astonishingly stupid. But he wasn’t going anywhere people would look for him.

At five minutes til, he stopped pacing and walked his article to his editor’s office. He laid it on the desk of Brad Brown with a queasy smile. “Sorry it’s so late,” he offered weakly. “But uh, I didn’t want it just laying around. …You’ll see.”

Brad unfolded the paper and skimmed it with his eyes, which widened a little at the bold headline. He dropped the page back to his desk after a cursory once-over, not even seeming to read it. “Dave,” he said gently, with a queasy little smile of his own. “You know I can’t print this.”

“Why not?” asked Davey, whose mouth was suddenly rather dry.

“You mean aside from libel laws and what the boys in legal would do to me if I sent it on?”

“It’s not libel,” Davey protested, but he had a sinking feeling in his gut that told him that this wasn’t an argument, it was a eulogy. “I have—proof.” It was only mostly a lie. If he showed Brad the pictures—and there were not words to express how much he did not want to do that—then maybe he’d believe Carson’s threats. But maybe he wouldn’t. After all, Carson stood only to benefit from the dispersal of Davey’s photographs.

But Brad wasn’t interested. “It’s crap, Dave. It’s whiny self-aggrandizement. I know that being accused of murder has made you something of a celebrity around here, but that doesn’t mean the _Chronicle_ is going to print your propaganda. That’s sensationalism, and that’s not how we sell papers.”

“Um,” Davey pointed out uncomfortably, “we’ve been selling papers with my self-aggrandizing sensationalism for weeks now.”

Brad smiled in a way that showed all his teeth, a pained look on his face. “That was when Mr. Carson wanted us to.”

Davey’s heart plummeted down to his ankles, where it banged around complainingly against his bones. “Oh,” was all he could say. He picked his article up from Brad’s desk and tucked in inside his jacket, a rustling autumnal overcoat he’d been wearing in attempt to get blood to pump through his fear-frozen veins again. “I understand.”

“Good,” said Brad, real relief on his face. “You can report to Alice Burgess in _Society_ tomorrow morning. She’ll have a new assignment for you.”

“Thanks,” Davey heard himself say weakly, though whatever Brad had said had passed through his ears and out the other side without leaving a mark on anything. Tomorrow morning was a non-issue. Davey wouldn’t survive the night.

 

* * *

 

"Have a seat, Detective.”

In Puget’s experience, these were the worst possible words Chief of Police Greg Suhr could say to you upon summoning you to his office. If what he had to say was pertinent to a case, he’d fire it at you while you were still in the doorway. If it was good news, like a personal commendation or a raise (that mythical beast of public service), he’d meet you at the door with a handshake. But if you walked into his office and Chief Suhr was sitting behind his desk, hands folded on his blotter, and he gestured magnanimously and instructed, “Have a seat”, especially if he used your title and not your name—nothing good was coming for you. Puget was instantly transported back to childhood, to the feeling he’d get in his gut when he was called to a conference with the school principal or, worse, his father. The cloud of unfounded guilt that would usually descend upon him in such circumstances was far more specific and direct than customary. Instead, all he could think about was which of the many things he’d done wrong Chief had found out about.

He couldn’t even decide which would be worst. Obviously it was not his neglected paperwork or unrecorded crime scene visits. It was probably not his carelessness with his phone that had led to Pullman breaking down his door. Fucking Carson, then. Or maybe the murder weapon that was still in his briefcase, under his desk, because he didn’t know what else to do with it. Among his myriad sins, it was kind of a toss-up.)

“Sure, Chief,” Puget said with an ease he absolutely did not feel. He closed the glass office door behind him, because he thought he’d probably go blind if the Chief asked him to, and eased himself casually into one of the chairs opposite the Chief’s desk. “What’s going on?”

The Chief raised an unimpressed eyebrow. “You tell me.”

_Fuck hell damn bitchmother shit_ , Puget thought calmly to himself. Fucking cops and their interrogation techniques! Chances were good that Chief didn’t know the extent of what was going on here. Chances were good he just wanted to chew Puget out for a sloppy report, or for mishandling the Carson case so badly that there was zero evidence that Carson was the killer—and he almost certainly was—and that Judge Ware was poised to laugh them out of his courtroom if they dared set foot in it. Okay. Okay. These were sins he could confess to.

Puget slumped back in his chair and ran a hand through his hair, as if bewildered. “You got me, Chief. I know that knife has got to be somewhere. It didn’t just vanish. But we haven’t found—”

“I know what you haven’t found,” the Chief rumbled. He was frowning so hard the corners of his mouth folded down at 90 degree angles. “Tell me what you _have_ found, Detective, because right now it looks like your killer is long gone and the Adam Carson angle is bust.”

Puget opened his mouth to protest Carson’s guilt but the Chief bulldozed him. “It _also_ looks like you have been fucking _negligent_ with the Wednesday case. If I’m reading your notes right you assigned Detective Carey for primary investigation. Making this her first solo case. The most brutal killing we’ve seen all year and you give it to a junior detective who has never headed up an investigation before. Is that correct?”

Puget wasn’t totally sure Chief even wanted an answer to this particular question, but as the silence stretched on, he realized he’d have to say something. “I want to cover all the bases on the Wednesday murder. I do,” he started slowly. The Chief’s lips were thin with disbelief but, for once, he said nothing. “That’s why I gave it to someone else. Because I just don’t see this playing out in any way where Carson isn’t our guy. So if I’m stuck on the Carson angle, who knows what I’m going to miss at the Wednesday scene? I’m supervising Carey closely, Chief. She’s a good cop with a great team and the case is in good hands with her. Until I can put the Carson murder to bed, I’m no good on that case. I’ve been doing this long enough to see that.”

The Chief let Puget’s long-winded excuse sink in for a minute. It was a true excuse. It was just one part of a much longer and truer excuse, maybe, but it was true. He couldn’t think about anything that wasn’t Carson. Carson was the killer, Carson was both killers, Carson was every and all killers. He was certain of it. And until he’d either found the evidence to prove it or lost everything in the pursuit—which he was well on his way to doing—he wasn’t going to be able to give anything else his full attention. And also, in spite of all his desperate clutching, his life was falling to miniscule shreds. There was a murder weapon in his briefcase that he could not report or return to the scene. His firearm was missing, presumed stolen. He’d fucked Adam Carson and he was losing. His. Shit. So yes: he’d given the Wednesday case to someone else. It was the most responsible thing he was able to do in this situation. The only way he could preserve evidence from that scene was to stay the hell out of it. Anything he got close to was burnt, stricken from the record. Chief just didn’t know it yet.

“I appreciate your honesty,” Chief Suhr said at last. It sounded grudging. “It’s a good cop who can see his own blind spots and limitations. But let me spell it out for you. Carson’s gone. He’s off the hook. We got nothing to put him away with, even if he killed them both. Unless you can uncover a new angle, the case is dead, and it is an embarrassment to me, it is an embarrassment to the force, it is an embarrassment to the entire state of California. And it is on you. So if you’re stuck on the Carson thing, I want you to think real hard about taking a leave of absence. A few weeks of sick leave, or a sabbatical. No one will think less of you for it. It won’t affect your job or your standing here. You’ve been on the job a long time and you’ve seen some hard shit and there’s not a boy here doesn’t know that. Do you understand what I’m saying, Detective? No one will blame you if you need a break.”

Puget read between the lines. “But if I fuck this up,” he said quietly.

The Chief nodded. “Smart man. If you fuck this up. If you let Eliza Carson’s killer slip through the cracks and you let Wynn Wednesday’s follow him out, I will blame you. The good people of San Francisco will blame you. My boss will blame you, and his boss will blame you, and you’ll be stuck behind the night desk in the slowest crime district we can find, and you will be stuck there until the end of time. Do I make myself clear?”

Puget nodded. “Of course, Chief.” It was a way out, and he might have taken it, if it were as simple as the Chief thought it was. If he could really just turn his back on this and walk away. If he had possession of his own damn firearm and had never slept with Adam Carson. If there wasn’t a blood-encrusted knife kicking around in his briefcase. If he was anywhere but here, anyone but him. “And I appreciate it. But I can’t walk away from this one. You know I can’t. You couldn’t either, if it was you.”

“It’s not me,” the Chief replied levelly, staring grimly across his desk. Then he sighed and waved his hand at the door, a dismissal. Puget got to his feet and tried to look neutral, though it was hard to remember the shape of it. “You think about it anyway, Puget.”

The detective nodded gratefully as he left the room.

 

After that encounter, Jade couldn’t concentrate on anything at his desk. His leg kept jiggling, the heel of his shoe scuffing against the briefcase. He didn’t usually carry a briefcase. Surely someone around the precinct had noticed that he never carried a briefcase. Surely someone around the precinct realized that he was trafficking murder weapons. It was the worst possible place to keep it, in a briefcase under his desk in the goddamn police station, but what else could he do with it? Leave it at his _house_? At least here he could claim someone had planted it on him, like an anonymous tip.

Jade paused for a moment and seriously considered reporting that the knife had turned up as an anonymous tip. Better yet, he could bribe one of his informants to actually do that, to drop it off in a cardboard box on the front desk and call it in from a pay phone. Maybe he could even get one of Carson’s staff members to do it.

But he stopped himself from thinking it. It would solve a lot of his problems. But it would only entangle him deeper in this hideous web of lies. It would only bend his investigation even further from its original shape, even more drastically unlike the truth. What kind of hideous, twisted golem of a case did he plan to drag into the courtroom? No, the last thing he wanted was to get pulled deeper into this. Carson had _given_ him the murder weapon. Any action he took might just play into Carson’s hands. How did he know it was the real weapon? How did he know it wasn’t a falsified prop—one with his own DNA on it, maybe? Fingerprints taken from the mug of coffee Carson had brought him a few weeks back? Until it was forensically analyzed he had no idea if it was legitimate. And Carson had proved to be a wily son of a bitch—a master of his game. There was no way he would just accidentally lead Jade to an incriminating weapon in his own home. Was there?

Jade had been going in circles on it since his smug-ass brother had turned up with the news that his crime scene was gone. Now that he could actually feel the Chief’s breath on the back of his neck, the presence of the knife was growing unbearable. He couldn’t do it, couldn’t just sit here with the knife waiting for Carson to bring his world down around him. He had to make a decision. He had to take action.

He had to get rid of the knife.

The drive to the Carson manor was one of the most terrifying he’d ever made in his life. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being followed, that at any moment a SWAT van would come out of nowhere, lights flashing, and T-bone him. Armed for bear, a team would swarm out of the van and, ignoring him where he screamed and bled in the twisted, burning wreckage, make a beeline for the briefcase he’d laid uneasily on the passenger seat. And this was just the first of many scenarios, all of which were incredibly ridiculous and spectacularly unlikely. The only thing tailing him, he tried to convince himself, was a thick black snarl of regret, which darkened his wake and poured off him in waves. There wasn’t a choice he’d made yet that hadn’t turned out wrong. It seemed more and more likely that this case would be the death of him. Not just his career, mind you—Jade too.

No wonder he couldn’t stop sweating and his stomach felt like it was trying to crawl out of his body. It had nothing, he maintained, to do with the possibility of running into Carson. It had everything to do with the even more likely possibility that, what with his intention of burying a murder weapon in broad daylight on someone else’s property, he would be seen. Reported. Or worse, caught red-handed planting the knife. He didn’t know what kind of security Carson had these days. He didn’t know if his panicking and subsequent attempt to ditch the knife was going to thwart Carson’s plans, or if it _was_ the plan. What better way to frame Jade for the murders than to frame him framing Carson? He was supposed to know how criminals thought. Was supposed to have a knack for it. But it had abandoned him, like all good sense, the moment in the garden. And now he was lost in the dark of trying to guess at Carson’s motives and thoughts. Of trying to guess at his own.

Jade parked down the block, far enough out that even the most ambitious security cameras wouldn’t get him, although he was more aware than most that the Carson manor had no such cameras. If this was a wild, impulsive, tremendous mistake, he was going to make it carefully. He took the knife out of the briefcase and stuffed in inside his jacket, its proximity to his skin making him queasy.  
He walked casually in the direction of the manor, as if he had nothing to hide. There were no sidewalks; this was not walking territory. But he walked anyway. He put his hands in his pockets and wished he was wearing jeans, not a suit. He tried out a whistle and quickly canned it. Whistling was no good. All the while his feet took him closer to Carson’s home.

He approached the house from the side, cutting across the grass like this too was the most casual thing in the world. Once the street view was blocked by landscaping, Jade put himself low to the ground and advanced that way. He knew from experience the back gardens were too large and he’d get lost in them; he planned to bury it in one of the flowerbeds in the house’s shadow. He thought he’d be able to talk Chief into one final sweep of the grounds, if he made it sound like he was willing to ignore Carson’s almost certain guilt. He wouldn’t even go with. The dogs would find it. And as long as the knife hadn’t been tampered with, it would be enough to put Carson away for a long time.

That was the plan, anyway. Jade was twenty paces from the first flowerbed when he thought he saw—no, he definitely saw—one of the curtains _move_. It moved in the exact way a curtain moves when someone is standing behind it, watching surreptitiously out their window. Jade’s heart threatened to explode. He threw himself flat onto the ground, as if he were less conspicuous on his belly than he had been in a low crouch. His thoughts raced, incomprehensible. It was Carson; it had to be Carson. Forget the murder weapon. Forget the whole fucking case. Adam Carson was inside the house, _watching him_ , and there was only one thing he could do.

Run like hell.

 

* * *

 

The night was hot as hell. Hunter sweltered all over the streets. This was the time of year when the chilled fingers of San Francisco’s omnipresent wind was meant to grip you by the shoulder, shake your hand, breathe its cold breath down your neck. This was the time of year when the few deciduous trees withered and dropped leaves like old, cracked leather. September had ended. Autumn was here.

But tonight it was August again. Sweating under his collar, melted by the hot metallic updraft of every passing car, marking the shimmering waves coming off all the young bodies bared to the street, sticky and hot—tonight Eliza Carson was still alive, and Wynn Wednesday too. Tonight he’d gone back in time, and anything was possible.

Hunter had hit a dead end in his case, or something like it. He’d woken up not to the purr of Lenore Cotreau but to the clipped, precise voice of a businesswoman. In her smart hobble skirt, burlesque and high-waisted, with a crisp collared blouse tucked into it, with horn-rimmed glasses balanced on her nose, the woman was nigh unrecognizable. “Some of us have day jobs, lazy bones,” she’d said, and he’d opened bleary eyes to the transformed Lenore standing over him. Apparently, sizzling songstress was only a part-time gig. He felt a little robbed by that knowledge. She looked spectacular, of course, in her office wear. But she could be anybody now. An exceptionally attractive executive, a no-nonsense secretary with a phenomenal ass.

That’s what you get, of course, when you go home with the girl. You get the _girl_. You kill the illusion. Cotreau wasn’t the damsel in distress, the charming chanteuse he’d cast her as. Instead she was any woman, every woman, taking the bus to work in the morning with today’s copy of the _Chronicle_ sticking out of her shoulder bag. Lenore Cotreau, lounge singer, was a suit she stepped into and zipped up her liquid curves, same as this one. The Holiday Club, Lenore, the whole gorgeous noir scene was exactly that: a scene. Playing pretend. An act. Engineered to appeal to sad saps like him who deluded themselves into trench coats and pulp novel plotlines.

“Not me,” he’d told her, and for the first time it struck him as a little sad, the way he treated his hobby like it was a career. He filed W2s, for god’s sake. And he wrote _private investigator_ on the occupation line of every form he’d ever filled out. He might as well be running around in a costume space suit and telling everyone he was an astronaut. He hadn’t been pursuing an investigation the previous night; he’d been sleeping with a fantasy for his own damn self. He’d let Wynn Wednesday die and then, worse, he’d turned her into part of his story. Another layer of smoke and glamour, a puzzling detail of a case. He’d let her fade into the sordid history, the set-up, voice-overed by someone with a throat full of gravel, and gone ahead with his _dame_ this, _dame_ that, as if she’d never been anything more than a plot device.

“Good for you, sugar,” the woman who wasn’t Lenore told him, smiling in a secret, fond way that made Hunter feel sick. “Now get dressed and get out so I can lock the door behind us.” Her eyes flicked over him and her smile became more public. “I’ll even let you walk me to the bus stop.”

So he’d come to find himself here, a few days later, pounding the unseasonably warm pavement for something, anything, that would tell him about Wynn Wednesday or her killer. He had tried to go back to the crime scene after all. He’d been met at the repaired door by a wan-looking female detective. “There are a few articles missing from the scene of the crime,” she’d told him pointedly. “Would you know anything about that?”

This time he knew for sure he’d never go back.

He ashed onto the street, smoking up his entire retainer for the Carson case, which he had not only made no progress on but had stopped looking into entirely. Carson probably did it anyway. Carson almost certainly had, in fact. Hunter was just a prop, a set piece, an atmospheric additive wielded by someone else. Part of Carson’s cantilevered mask of innocence. Hunter found he didn’t mind being a hollow man propped up wherever it was convenient. It was still the most interesting case he’d ever had and besides, hadn’t he been using other people as set pieces for the duration? To outline and accentuate his elaborate fantasy of Hunter Burgan, PI. Carson would probably pay him more to _not_ look into the case if he dropped some strongly-worded hints. But doing that would take time away from Wynn Wednesday.

If Carson was the caller, he wasn’t the killer. If he was the killer, he wasn’t the caller. So who was his second man? Why was Wynn Wednesday dead? Hunter needed to know this. Hunter could not live without knowing this. Right now the only answer he had was that Wynn Wednesday was dead because he did not protect her. And that answer was driving him mad.

He heard the footsteps behind him. The streetlights made everything look brassy, parked cars and prostitutes lined up along old brick buildings. He’d gone ahead and wandered out of the Mission district and into a bad part of town. He wasn’t looking for trouble so much as hoping that trouble was looking for him. He heard the footsteps behind him and paused directly under a streetlight to light another cigarette with a matchbook from the Holiday Club, in case they wanted to make sure they had the right guy. He nodded companionably to the nearest hooker before he started walking again, this time straight for a dark alley.

They were on him before he’d taken five steps into the dark. Someone grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around. Hunter moved his cigarette away from his mouth carefully as he spun, not wanting to stick it in anyone’s eye. A fist slammed into his gut, not an experience he’d recommend with a lung full of smoke, and the bag came down over his head while he was still choking on his exhalation. Then he was spinning again and they had his wrists ziptied together, behind his back, just as quick. He was impressed by the professionalism here. Maybe it was the bag over his head or how he couldn’t breathe for retching, but he couldn’t tell how many of them there were. Once his hands were tied, they knocked him down. He felt himself falling but with no hands to slow his descent, he took the impact on his face. Then the first booted foot slammed into him. The world exploded into bursts of white-hot pain as the blows began to fall. Hunter closed his eyes and, not without gratitude, passed out.

 

* * *

 

Davey was reeling. He’d had a plan for his safety—not a great one or anything—but he’d gambled pretty hard on it working. He wasn’t a fighter or a strategist or a political power. He wasn’t a somebody. He’d only taken the memory card because he thought he could use the newspaper to keep him safe. But Carson had gotten to his editor. Carson maybe even owned his editor. Or the whole paper. And he was—he was what? He was a fly in the web. He was a mouse in a world made for people.

He didn’t know where to go.

The streets didn’t seem safe, per se, but at least there were other people on them. It was a warm night, probably the last one for a long while, and half the city was out enjoying it. Besides which there were a lot of streets. There was only one apartment leased to David Marchand. So if someone _was_ looking for him, out in the city seemed safer than sitting behind a door with his name on it. For similar reasoning he’d left the _Chronicle_ office and hit the San Franciscan night. He aimed to get lost in it. He wanted to just melt away.

The problem with that, of course, was that he was human. He couldn’t walk all night. He needed something to eat and somewhere to sleep. Currently he was circling a La Quinta Inn, arguing with himself the wisdom of registering a hotel room in his own name. Yes, it was a risk, the prevailing line went, but so was spending the night on a park bench. At least in the hotel room Carson was the only thing he had to be afraid of. Unconsciousness in a public park in the wee hours brought with it a specialized set of risks.

Davey leaned back against a wall halfway around the block from the La Quinta. He stopped, slumped, hung his head and stared at the pavement. Trying to think. Trying _not_ to think. He was scared, he was exhausted, he had to pee like you would not believe. The facts in evidence were that Adam Carson was almost certainly guilty, Davey’s life was almost certainly in danger, everyone could agree that it was probably not the best idea to go home, and he could neither walk around the city all night nor safely sleep in a park. Given these facts he could either decide he was being paranoid and delusional and go home, or decide he was being paranoid but probably was on to something and check into a hotel.

“Okay,” he said to the pavement. “Hotel it is.”

He pushed off the wall to head back in the direction of La Quinta. Even as he moved, a chunk of the brick wall next to where his head had been exploded. A fraction of a second later he registered a sound he’d only heard on TV but instantly recognized: a gun had fired. He was being shot at.

Davey broke into a run. To his horror and badly timed embarrassment, his bladder gave up its charade and piss soaked hot and wet down his leg. He kept his head low and tried desperately to remember any tips he might have picked up about what to do if someone was trying to gun you down. Were you supposed to run in a zigzag? Or was that if you were being chased by an alligator? Davey zigzagged anyway, in case. A moving target was harder to hit.

Davey stumbled as the second bullet burst the window of a parked car he’d banked off of a heartbeat earlier. He lost precious seconds scraping his hands and knees on the pavement. Then he was up again, running. The streets were suddenly deserted; funny how gunshots cleared a room, a boulevard. He wanted to scream, to yell ‘help’ or ‘fire’ or whatever it was that made people come to your aid. But witnesses wouldn’t protect him. Carson would just buy them off too.

Instead he set his sights on the corner. If he could get around the corner, for one precious moment safe—he’d have seconds, seconds only, to hide. A doorway to duck into. A car to dive behind. Even piss-soaked and adrenalin-flayed, even bleeding from the palms and weeping snot and tears, even running for his life—he fished his new camera from his bag. (Hadn’t taking pictures gotten him in enough trouble? Yes. But he wasn’t going to just die in the street like a dog because someone bigger than him wanted him to. He was going to make it around the corner, he was going to hide, and he was going to face his attacker as they rounded the building.)

The sound of his heartbeat, his breathing, his footsteps, were all. He fixed his eyes on the corner and time sped up; he sling-shotted around it and burst into the concrete stairwell that descended to a pool bar before him. He boosted himself over the railing and clattered onto the stairs, landing badly—bruisingly. He held up his camera, the gesture pathetically reminiscent of a shield, a small and feeble one at that.

His attacker did not come. The street was all stillness, all silence. Davey held up his camera until his breathing had slowed. Til the pain in his wrenched ankle grew to command his attention. Til the piss down his leg cooled and began to reek. Til he could not hold the camera up any longer and had to prop it on the concrete ledge. Til at last a patron exiting the pool bar jostled him with a concerned look and walked safely out onto the street, and no one shot at him.

At last Davey allowed himself to collapse on the stairs. At last he let himself believe he had survived. Carson’s man had only fired 2 shots before deciding he was too much trouble.

Whatever the reason, piss-soaked and bloody on the concrete stairs, Davey let himself feel safe. He didn’t think Carson would try again. The point had been made: if Carson wanted him dead, he would be. His life was less than a scrap of paper turned by the wind. He was powerless.

Piece by piece, Davey collected himself. He felt strangely at peace. He had survived. He limped to the curb and started the search for a late-night bus or cab. He wasn’t running anymore. He was going home.  


  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=8874>  



	11. The Guilty and the Damned

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not going to lie to you, guys, this is my favorite chapter. I think it is awesome and I encourage you to agree. I don't own the boys and none of this ever happened, but that don't stop us from wishing it did. Enjoy!

The Chairman surveyed the lukewarm spread of bachelor chow Jade had scraped together for supper, implying with the angle of his ears and the flick of his tail that he found the selection abysmal.

“Well I’m not asking _you_ to eat it,” Jade told him crabbily. He had prepared a dish he was calling Chief Wants Me To Take A Leave of Absence and A Madman Has My Gun, Not To Mention That Time I Ran From A Shadow In a Windowpane Like A Child, and it looked rather like something a hobo would make in a boot. He’d served it with a side of My Whole Life Is Falling Apart in an old tire.

The whiskey, he found, really brought the flavors together. Though it was a Wednesday, he hadn’t gone into work today. He hadn’t felt inclined to bathe, either. Instead he had passed the day in staring queasily at his briefcase and watching daytime television, also queasily. He was meant to be ruminating on his fixation with the Carson case so he could put it behind him. So he could go in tomorrow ready to focus his energies on the murder of Wynn Wednesday, so he could catch the bad guy and put him away and do something positive with his life before it fell down around his ears.

He had not been successful thus far.

The chime of the doorbell shattered the comfortable stupor that had settled over the tableau. Jade’s stomach dropped out of his body entirely at the sound. This was it—what he’d been waiting for. This was the next body. This was Pullman alone or Pullman with back-up here to tell him either that someone had been shot, or that someone had been shot with his gun. He hadn’t known he’d been waiting until it happened, but suddenly he realized why he’d been hiding here all day, paralyzed by dread. It was a way of giving up.

He walked to the door as if to the gallows. He was dressed for the occasion: rumpled pajama pants, stained undershirt. Uncombed hair, unshaven jaw. Heavyset, scowling feline beast wending about his ankles. A damned soul. He was the complete package.

He was not, however, prepared for what waited on the other side of the door.

Dressed in an immaculately pressed traditional suit, overcoat, and black leather gloves, Carson’s butler stood primly on Jade’s stoop. He held in his hands a small, brass-buckled case.

For a moment Jade just stared dumbly. The Chairman pushed past him, sniffed cursorily at the butler’s pant leg, and headed purposefully out into the evening. Jade watched him go. At length he managed to say, “Uh, come in?”

The butler’s mouth twitched at Jade’s clumsy manners. “That won’t be necessary,” he said—a little snidely, Jade thought. He placed the case in Jade’s hands. Jade didn’t know what to do but accept it. “Mr. Carson sends his regards,” the butler added ominously, then turned on heel and walked smartly down the front walk and back to the long, black car idling behind Jade’s cruiser in the driveway.

Numbly, Jade closed—and locked—his front door and sank into the nearest chair, an overstuffed armchair in the living room the cat had claimed for his own shortly after moving in. He balanced the case on his knees and released the clasps, hands trembling.

Inside the case, nestled in sculpted velvet, was his gun.  
For a moment Jade was unable to move. Then he flew into motion. He ran his hands over the Smith & Wesson; checked the serial number as if he didn’t recognize the thing instinctually, on a primal level, as one would recognize a limb; held it snug in his palm and popped the magazine, counted bullets. All rounds were present and accounted for. It smelled of gun oil, the brand Jade used, and showed smudges on the grip where Jade habitually ran his thumb. There was no scent or evidence of powder or discharge—or of careful cleaning to obscure said evidence.

He let out a breath he hadn’t been aware of holding. Either his gun had not been fired, or an exacting study of Jade’s firearm habits had been conducted and then replicated. He was holding his gun and it hadn’t been fired. He was safe.

The relief was short-lived. _Mr. Carson sends his regards_. Why had Carson returned the gun? Why had he seduced Jade to get it in the first place, if he wasn’t going to use it or hold Jade hostage? Why bother making a good faith gesture now? It wasn’t as if Carson had a soft spot for him—he’d made that much abundantly clear. It was a game and Jade had lost it. This had to be a misdirect—a foil.

And yet. Here it was.

Jade burst into sudden, frenetic movement anew. He flipped the case in his hands, roving his fingers over the front and back for creases, for secrets, for clues. Finding nothing he flipped it over again and prised his fingernails into the seam between the plastic and the lining. The sculpted velvet came free easily. Beneath it he found what he was looking for. The catch. Magicians can’t really pull rabbits out of hats, you see, or coins out of thin air. All they can do is distract you from the blatant deception unfolding right before your eyes.

A folded white square lay in the bottom of the case. Jade unfolded it warily, though it was unlikely a furious rattlesnake would fit into a parcel of its size.

It was a photocopy of a photograph. It made Jade’s blood freeze in his veins, his heart a tightening block of ice. Beneath it was written,

 

> _Very thorough, Detective.  
>  I daresay you’ll agree we have much to discuss.  
>  Please, join me for supper at 7pm Friday._
> 
> _Yours,  
>  A.C. _

 

“Right,” Jade said aloud, folding it back into a square and pocketing it. He took up his gun next, taking a grateful moment to be comforted by its weight. Carson wanted to blackmail him? It was a relief. It was better than waiting. Waiting was driving him mad. Jade detoured upstairs to put on some pants and a shirt. There wasn’t time to shower or shave. He stuck his gun in his belt holster and grabbed his briefcase from its place as centerpiece on the kitchen table.

Carson wanted to talk? Oh, they’d talk. But Jade wasn’t waiting for Friday. He’d done his waiting. They’d have a good long conversation, and they’d have it now.

Jade slammed the door on his way out of the house. He did not lock it behind him.

 

* * *

 

Hunter woke in the dark. His head felt thick, fuzzy—throbbing. He took slow inventory of the rest of his body. There was a hearty chorus of pain and stiffness. Nothing felt broken, though much felt bruised. He suspected at least one rib was cracked. By and by he became aware that he seemed to be tied to a chair. He took an experimental breath through his mouth. It filled with cloth. There was a bag over his head, then.

Hunter knew what happened next. He’d struggle, give evidence of his consciousness. The bag would be removed. The light would be blinding. He’d be jostled, hit, disoriented, frightened. There might be water thrown on him, though he hoped it wasn’t going to be that sort of interview.

There was only one way to find out.

Hunter cleared his throat loudly. Roughly, the hood came off. Hunter’s pupils dilated to blindness and he had no time to prepare himself for the open-handed blow across the side of head that followed, bursting his ear into deafening pain and making him choke on his first greedy breath.

When the world swam back into view, Hunter found himself exactly where he’d expected. In a dark, smoky room, lit only by the bare bulb above him, with shadowy figures all around his periphery. Across from the chair he was tied to, a desk: at it sat a man, hands clasped on the blotter. That was all of him that Hunter could see: his face was in shadow. When he brought his cigarette to his lips the orange glow lit his eyes, his nose, his cheeks. It was not enough to identify him.

Hunter noted with relief that the floor was carpeted, and conspicuously lacked any kind of draining mechanism. It seemed unlikely anyone would be torturing him, then. It’d be a pity to stain the rug. He was ready for the next blow and ducked his head; it glanced (painfully) off his neck, sparing the ear he could still hear out of and his tender, swollen face.

“Call off your goons,” he spat out hoarsely. Finally having occasion to utter the phrase was, he decided, the silver lining of this whole abduction/possible torture situation he had for some reason chosen to orchestrate.

The man behind the desk laughed appreciatively. “Cute,” he chuckled. “I’d heard that about you—that you were a real Columbo.” He waved a hand at his goons, however, and their shadows retreated out of Hunter’s periphery. Called off, then. “The other thing I’d heard about you,” the man continued, “is that you’ve been asking the wrong questions in the wrong places.”

“What do you know about Wynn Wednesday’s murder?”

“Good example,” the man in the shadows said. His voice held considerably less humor. “I’d hoped asking politely would be enough to make all this… go away. What do you say?”

“Why did Wynn Wednesday die?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” The man sounded cross. “Adam Carson killed her.”

“No,” Hunter said, shaking his head, straining his bonds. He didn’t know how much he believed it until he said it. “No, he didn’t.”

The shadow man sighed unhappily. “Oh dear,” he said, voice brittle with artifice. “We seem have ourselves a loyalist. Boys?”

The fist came out of nowhere. His jaw exploded. His world was sick swimming pink, pain, and the chair toppled over from the force of it. The other side of his face hit the floor with momentum, torqueing his neck. A warm bloody tooth sat on his tongue. Hunter tried to spit it out, the motion bringing a fresh surge of hurt, and he retched from the pain and the taste of meat in his mouth. A slow wave of blood washed the tooth out between cracked lips. The pain was so great it was shocking; he couldn’t quite believe it, even as it beat hotly into him from all sides.

The shadow man was leaning over him, hissing in his face. It was an immense effort of will to separate himself from the pain enough to make sense of human speech. “Wynn Wednesday is dead because the police are incompetent. Wynn Wednesday is dead because they couldn’t find one fucking shred of evidence that Carson cut his mother’s throat, and he wasn’t even going to make it to trial if it was left up to them. Something had to be done.”

The wheels in Hunter’s head were desperately trying to turn. Wynn Wednesday had been murdered to prevent murdering scum from walking free—was that what he was being told? His brain was sluggish, fogged and bruised. A cop, then? Was it a cop?

“If Wednesday had done like I told her, told the police the same bullshit she told you, then they would have had some proof, wouldn’t they have? But she wouldn’t speak up!” the shadow man was saying. Burgan observed that he had begun to sound somewhat insane.

“So you killed her,” he rasped, and it wasn’t a question. He’d stumbled to the heart of the matter, hadn’t he? This was the second man. The caller _and_ the killer. Lenore Cotreau was right. He’d gotten himself in more trouble than he could handle.

“Fine, yes, so I killed her. Is that what you want to hear?” The shadow man sneered and pulled back. He stood up and paced away.

“Forty-seven times.”

“Oh, have your delicate sensibilities been offended? It had to look like Carson did it, just like he did his dear old mum, create some compelling evidence to put his ass behind bars. So there would at least be a _struggle_ in the courthouse.

“But the police fucked that up too. They’ve given up on Carson, think he’s a dead end. They’re going to let the guilty motherfucker _walk_. It’s not even going to be a _challenge_.” The shadow man whirled back around suddenly and sunk a foot into Hunter’s gut. It was so unexpected Hunter had no time to anticipate it, to prepare himself for the attack; the foot connected and bile rose in an oxygen-choked throat and his vision exploded into ghosts and stars.

It was too little, too late. He’d seen the shadow man’s face. Something was familiar about him; Hunter knew he had seen him before. Now he just had to remember where.

To keep himself from passing out, Hunter wheezed again, “Forty-seven times.”

“Stop saying that,” snarled the shadow man. He was growing agitated, his calm collectedness slipping. Hunter squinted at him through a quickly swelling eye, trying to place the face.

“Forty-seven times,” Hunter repeated. He couldn’t make his voice any steadier or louder than a wheeze. “While she screamed and cried and begged for mercy. While she choked and gurgled and drowned in her own blood.”

“I did what was _necessary_ ,” the shadow man said through gritted teeth.

“You did forty-seven times what was ‘necessary’. Carson cut his mother’s throat in a single stroke. She didn’t suffer, she just died. You’re worse than he is. You’re forty-seven times worse than he’ll ever be. You’re forty-seven times—”

This time the shadow man’s foot connected with his face, and Hunter passed out of being.

 

* * *

 

Since the incident with the memory card, Adam had found his sense of discomfort in his own home had only grown. His suspicion of Alonso was a vague and shifting thing, lacking a dedicated shape. His skin prickled at times and he grew certain that Alonso was just out of sight around the edge of the doorframe, listening attentively, poised predatorily above a teeming mass of grub-like secrets Adam wanted to save from his hooked beak. He could not say why the idea of his butler nearby, within earshot, be he dusting a curio or piqued for gossip, made him squirm. Distrust was an unflattering lens to view your lifelong chief of staff and trusted lieutenant through, but Adam couldn’t shake it. Alonso was a physical presence in the house even when had retired to his quarters in the disused servant’s wing for the night. Adam had taken to making preposterous requests, to sending him after one questing beast after another, just to secure for himself a moment’s peace.

Tonight he’d fabricated an insatiable and highly specific need for fried calamari from a run-down little beachside restaurant in San Luis Obispo, a mere 4 hour drive from Marin. Adam had no particular reason to believe that the restaurant he’d described so rhapsodically even existed. Alonso had politely suggested a number of calamari alternatives, followed by a terse list of courier alternatives, but Adam dismissed them all out of hand. It had to be San Luis Obispo, where he’d eaten once as a child—ah, he remembered it so clearly: the way epicurean pleasure filled his father’s eyes, yes, the crisp breading, not a fleck of grease to be found, the perfect balance between rubber and raw—and who could faithfully perform such a task but Alonso? For, tragedy of tragedies, the name of the restaurant had been lost to the ravages of time.

Adam suspected Alonso was growing suspicious of his suspicions. But Adam couldn’t even trust him with his mistrust. He didn’t even especially _like_ calamari, breaded or otherwise. He couldn’t ever recall his father expressing much of a fondness for it, either.

When the doorbell rang it took Adam entirely off guard. Traditionally a man kept household staff chiefly to save himself the trouble of ever hearing his doorbell ring, let alone answering it when it did. He was not in the custom of receiving uninvited guests.

The doorbell rang again and Adam realized he’d have to answer it or it was liable to wheeze and clang all night long. Even if he improbably located the mythical restaurant (very precisely described), Alonso wouldn’t be back before dawn, and he didn’t think he could stand it until then. This realization made him crabby enough. The sight of Detective Puget on his doorstep undid him entirely.

He opened the door and let it swing pendulously into the grand entrance hall behind him. He saw at once that the detective was in a state. He gripped his briefcase in white knuckles; his face was creased up in self-righteous fury with a dangerous edge—an over-the-edge edge. Adam didn’t fail to note how _good_ he looked, either. His soft skin was made coarse by stubble, his hair tousled, his eyes bright with the delicious madness of a man pushed too far. It was palpable, animal electric; the desperation and rage came off him in physical waves, particles, filling the air. Adam could taste it on the back of his tongue.

“Detective,” Adam said, a note in his voice that was not unlike choking. “How unexpected.”

It was the politest understatement he could muster. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” he added innocently. If he wasn’t mistaken, his palms had begun to sweat. He was having trouble maintaining his composure, which was a new effect of Puget’s presence. Did he have _feelings_ for this man? Of course not. Given the opportunity he wasn’t even sure he’d be interested in sex again. (Parts of Adam were at least 99% sure that last bit was a bald-faced lie.)

“You blackmailed me,” the detective growled, voice so low it raised the hairs on the back of Adam’s neck.

“I invited you to dinner!” Adam protested, pretending furiously he wasn’t imagining how that stubble would feel chafing his thighs, his throat, his lips.

Jade’s hand parted the folds of his jacket deliberately, betraying his experience with spooked madmen. Despite his care to make the motion less threatening, Adam wasn’t sure he wasn’t pulling a gun until he drew out a folded white square. He set down his briefcase with the same violent self-control and unfolded the square for Adam to see. It showed, of course, Davey’s photograph. Having sent the note personally, not hours ago, Adam didn’t need reminding. Still the sight of all that skin was a physical jolt low in his belly.

“That was just… incentive,” Adam defended himself lamely, from a great distance. The space between their respective bodies seemed to him to stretch and strain with longing to be left raw and red and reeling.

“Incentive?” Puget repeated menacingly. Adam loved it. Adam could not get enough.

“It would be better if you had come on Friday.” Adam allowed Puget to shove roughly past him into the foyer, distantly troubled by the weakness in his knees and the sudden swell of saliva in his mouth at the abrasive touch. This was _his_ game, _his_ ground, _his_ rules. But when he opened his mouth to seize control he just resumed babbling. “I gave all the staff that night off. I was going to cook dinner myself. Terrible idea, of course. I don’t have the best track record. If you feel like waiting, there is an eventual possibility of calamari tonight, but it will be quite cold…”

As he spoke he was dimly aware of moving closer, as if magnetically drawn into a tighter and tighter orbit around the shimmering, seething detective.

But Puget noticed too. He backed up, raised his briefcase between them like a shield. “We’re not _doing_ this your way,” he said through gritted teeth. “I’m not here for dinner.”

It was the perfect moment for a suggestive quip, but Adam found himself too sullen at being shut down to provide one. “Which is fortuitous as it’s not _Friday_ —did I mention that?—and consequently I have nothing to offer you,” he replied pettily. The detective wasn’t even listening.

Instead Puget was doing something very curious. He was drawing his weapon. He was releasing the safety. He was pointing it at Adam’s heart. And he was saying very calmly, very evenly, “Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you right now.”

Something about having a gun trained steadily on your ever-beating chest really brings you back to yourself, Adam discovered. Didn’t do much to take his mind off sex, somewhat alarmingly, but had restorative effects nonetheless. Objectively, the situation had just escalated to a point well outside of Adam’s control. And that made him feel very in control again.

“I can’t,” Adam told him once the appropriate period of respectful silence had elapsed. He threw in a shrug for good measure, hoping Puget appreciated the way his eggplant-colored shirt clung to his chest and strained across his shoulders as he did so.

“You probably should,” he continued reasonably. “It would solve most of your problems, wouldn’t it? And wrap up more than a few of your ongoing investigations quite nicely. You wouldn’t believe how easy it is to hang blame on a dead man. Not so with women, I’ve found.” Adam showed his bright white teeth in his most charming smile, as if to reassure Puget that he was doing an excellent job of menacing Adam with his gun. “I’d go as far as to say that the only reason I’m alive right now is because you find the act of killing to be… distasteful. But you aren’t a squeamish man, Jade.” Adam smiled again and took a bold step closer. Puget’s face hadn’t changed yet and didn’t change now. “You’ve never shied away from unpleasant necessities. That’s why you’re good at your job, better than other men. You don’t flinch from the darkness.”

“I asked for a reason, Carson, not a load of poetical bullshit,” Puget barked warningly. The gun did not waver.

“Shoot me, Jade,” Adam said. His own tongue was deliciously wet between his teeth. His heart raced, peaking, and he folded his hands over it in a gesture of sincerity. His erection was no longer concealed by the fold of his slacks. He asked himself seriously if he _wanted_ Jade to shoot him in the chest and he didn’t know the answer. He certainly seemed to find the idea of it exciting. He didn’t find that he especially wanted to die, but neither would he mind, he thought, if Puget were to kill him.

“It would be so romantic,” he pushed, taunting, flirting, testing what it took to make Jade break. Maybe he _did_ want to die. “Thine bullet wouldst pierce my twisted heart more surely than Cupid’s trembling arrow! Were only I assured of a kiss before dying, gladly wouldst I plunge into yonder abyss.”

“For god’s sake,” Puget snapped. Mugging Shakespeare was, apparently, too much. As he lowered his gun, he rolled his eyes. “You deserve to be shot for that alone.” Adam watched the gun, limp at Jade’s side, with a pounding heart and the taste on his tongue of disappointment. For a bright, irrational moment he wondered what he could do, what he could say, that would make Puget raise the gun again.

“So where does this leave us?” the detective asked. He sounded tired and annoyed. “If I’m not going to shoot you—for the moment, anyway—what do we do about those photographs of yours? What do you want?”

What do you do when you slip on the ice, when you hydroplane, when you spin out of control? You steer into the skid. You don’t fight it. You control chaos by giving into it, by losing control. So Adam shelved his inexplicable disappointment, his foiled arousal. He told Jade exactly what he wanted, what his whole nefarious plan had been.

“Dinner,” he said. “I wanted to have dinner with you.”

He was heartened to see Puget made no move to put away the gun.

 

* * *

 

Puget followed the madman into a stately dining room, all dark wood and stained glass and heavy velvet curtains. The sconces on the walls and the dusty chandelier cast the room in low, intimate light. Ornate brass candelabras set with tall candles sat in the center of the great dining table every few feet. The table itself was enormous: it ran the length of the room, over twenty feet long by Jade’s estimate. Somber tall-backed chairs lined both sides.

Being one of just two men in a room of such pomp and scope made Puget feel like a ghost. He couldn’t imagine eating in such an ominous, forbidding room day after day. In spite of himself, he hoped Carson did not. The scale, the grandness, the emptiness, the age—they culminated into something dark, oppressive, dreadful. It made Jade feel unreal.

Carson pulled a chair out for him. Puget stared at him for a moment, but he betrayed nothing. It wasn’t a joke. He really was ushering Puget into a seat. “Thank you,” Jade said awkwardly as he sat.

Carson walked around the table to sit across from Puget before he spoke. Even then his words didn’t seem directed at Jade. “Shit, I didn’t have the candles lit,” he muttered. “Won’t be able to see a damned thing.”

“Here,” Jade heard himself saying, producing a plastic lighter from his pocket. He couldn’t have said why, but he passed the lighter to Carson and watched as he lit the nearest candelabra. “Does takeout always stand on such high ceremony?” he joked gently, as if his purpose here was to put Carson at ease. As if he hadn’t been threatening him with a gun five minutes ago.

Carson’s face looked astonishingly human in apology. “Sorry again that it’s just take-out,” he said. “I’d planned something nicer.”

 _Better than I’d be eating at home_ , Jade almost said, hearkening back to the Bachelor Chow congealing on his own table. He stopped himself, tightening his grip on the gun still in his hand. It wasn’t a social visit.

“Why?” Puget asked instead. “What is the point of this exercise? The bashful host, the dinner party—what does it have to do with the photographs?”

Carson looked displeased at Puget’s question, as if it were in very bad taste. Instead of the ripple of displeasure passing and leaving his face as smooth and composed as ever, he continued to frown. Holding up the lighter he asked, “Do you have any cigarettes to go with this?”

Jade did not disguise his sigh. He produced from his pack a cigarette for each of them, giving up on getting a straight answer out of Carson. His weapon was the only bargaining chip he had, and he’d already demonstrated his unwillingness to use it. That left him in a singularly weak position to negotiate from. Either he’d have to decide he didn’t give a shit anymore about the damningly photographic evidence Carson possessed, or he’d have to wait for their sushi to arrive, eat his goddamn spring rolls, and wait for Carson to tell him what he wanted. You couldn’t compel a man to do your bidding at gunpoint if he didn’t fear death, if he _wanted_ to be shot.

Carson put a cigarette to his lips and lit it, then passed it back to Jade. He took the second cigarette for himself. It was a perversely outdated gesture of chivalry, of 1920s-era gentlemanliness. Jade didn’t want to taste Carson’s lips on the end of his cigarette, didn’t want to even think about them, but Carson was watching him closely. He wouldn’t be seen to hesitate. Jade took a deep drag, staring back into Carson’s cold, killer’s eyes, meeting the unspoken challenge.

Sexual overtures aside, the cigarette helped. Carson did not return his lighter—hoping to pull the same stunt with a second cigarette, maybe. Puget noted it.

“If I tell you something stupid,” Carson said after a long, smoky pause, “will you promise not to leave?” He ashed casually onto the tabletop, which looked very old, possibly handcrafted, and doubtlessly priceless. Puget followed suit.

“I’m not far from leaving regardless of what you tell me,” Jade answered truthfully.

Carson’s frown returned. “Just for dinner. Please just stay for dinner.”

Puget bought himself some time with a long, contemplative drag on his cigarette. “No promises.” He said it mostly because he could see Carson was becoming annoyed by his refusal.

“I don’t have any other pictures,” Carson said bluntly. “There’s just the one, and it’s a bad one. I couldn’t possibly use it to blackmail you. Okay? So put your damn gun away and have dinner with me.”

Puget was taken by the sudden urge to put out his cigarette in Carson’s pretty blue eye. His other inclination was to let the relief wash over him, to be hoodwinked and deceived, to laugh. Of course Carson was lying to him. Of course. Wasn’t he? But didn’t it run completely contrary to the purpose of blackmail to make your victim believe he wasn’t being blackmailed?

Carson was telling the truth. Sometimes the simplest explanation is the right one.

Jade went ahead and laughed. Carson quirked his lips, smiling, sharing the joke. “Why would you tell me that? Why would a man in your position—”

“Like I said,” Carson interrupted, “I wanted to have dinner with you.”

Jade knew better. He was smarter than this and he wouldn’t be taken in again. But he’d be damned if it wasn’t a little sweet, all things considered, that Carson would spend such a powerful bargaining chip on this. It could well be—almost certainly was—a trick: an attempt to seduce, to get a better picture. Perhaps it was an opportunity to manipulate him, to sway him to Adam’s cause. But Puget wasn’t a powerful ally, anymore. He was just a disgraced and harried policeman, these days, unable to let go of one bad guy so he could try to catch another—fixated on a bogeyman he had no proof but gut conviction existed.

So he went ahead and thought it was sweet. A murderer had blackmailed him into a dinner date and it turned out he liked it better than roses, or moonlit walks on the beach, or playing Scrabble by the fire, adopting a dog, and growing old together. It turned out it wasn’t sandy blond hair or shy eyes he went for after all. It was psychopaths. Because damn if pointing a gun at Carson’s hadn’t made him want to do a whole host of other things to him. In spite of everything. In spite of Eliza Carson, in spite of Wynn Wednesday, in spite of himself.

If it was an elaborate trap, Carson had trapped him. Struggling had only made the bonds together.

Before he could think better of it, Jade had stubbed out his smoke on the priceless tabletop and was on his feet. He was halfway around the table before he realized he was still squeezing his gun. By the time he got there, Carson was standing too.

“You think I killed her,” Carson murmured. Jade watched his lips.

“I know you did,” Jade replied. Requisite punchy dialogue out of the way, he slipped his free hand behind Adam’s head, knotting his fingers in Adam’s hair, and brought their mouths together with the necessary degree of violence.

 

 

They shared another cigarette, after. Jade, whose legs had given out with his climax, sat bare-assed and cross-legged on the floor. He wondered what the staff would think of the dried semen on the velvety rug. They were probably too well-bred to mention it. Carson laid on his back on the beautiful table, eyes closed as he smoked. Smoking cigarettes on his back had always made Jade a little high from the extra concentration of nicotine. He stayed upright, taking in the sight of Carson greedily while he wasn’t watching.

His gun ended up not in the tangle of clothes but on the edge of the table. He’d held it tightly while he’d bent Carson over the table and fucked him. The safety had not been on. It wasn’t on now.

Jade idly tested the tenderness of the shiny new burn on his left forearm. Carson’s cigarette had burned down to the filter as they’d kissed. When it started burning his fingers he’d dropped it. Jade had apparently caught it, though he hadn’t felt it at the time. It was pink and tender now, stinging and sharp. Jade felt something like fondness as he poked at it, eliciting little bursts of hurt.

Little bursts of hurt: concentrated eruptions of agony. That was what this was, with Carson, wasn’t it? A way to hurt himself. A faster-acting cigarette.

“What are you thinking?” came Carson’s voice, sleeping and content. He turned his head to the side and looked down at Jade.

“You’re a mistake,” Jade answered distractedly. Now that the inevitable had unfolded, that single track of his entire existence that culminated in Carson, the inescapable path that ended in Carson’s body, his head had begun once more to leap and twist and spin. He didn’t wonder anymore what he would do. At this point, he wouldn’t do anything. He’d just wait. The end was nigh.

“Every minute I spend with you is a mistake,” he continued, speaking quietly. “You make me feel out of control. Feral. I keep doing things, wanting things, that are wrong. That I would never do. I’m not… safe with you. I’m not safe _from_ you and _I’m_ not safe either. I never know what’s going to happen… what I’m going to do next.”

“I think you like unpredictable,” said Carson, and he picked up the gun.

Neither of them made a sound, not wanting to tip the scales with a chance exhalation, a murmur of breath. No one was in control, anymore. One was the ship, the other the rocks. Neither knew who was who. Jade’s heart slowed down until the space between beats was large and long enough to fill the somber room, to fill lifetimes.

Before either of them could think of what to say, what to do, the doorbell rang. Adam leveled the gun with Jade’s head, holding it in both hands, and said, “Shouldn’t leave your weapons lying around like this, Detective. Very careless. Bang bang—you’re dead.” Then Carson laid the weapon back down on the table and said, as if none of the last 20 minutes had ever happened, “That must be our sushi. Dinner is served!”

Bare-assed and empty handed, he padded out of the room on bare feet. Not yet quite able to exhale, Jade watched him go, left helplessly thinking what a fine ass it was.  


  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=8874>  



	12. The Long Game

Adam opened the door only wide enough to receive a paper bag of food. He stuck his face through the gap saying, “I seem to have left my wallet in my pants”.

“Sorry?” said his attorney, who was standing on the stoop.

“I can’t help but notice you aren’t here to deliver my sushi.” There was not so much as a ripple in his external mask of calm, but beneath the surface his mind churned violently. Somehow his appointment with Smith Puget had quite slipped Adam’s mind after the detective had shown up, waving a gun around and screaming. He found himself in a very delicate position. He was aware that if he revealed to Smith his own buck-ass naked brother, his trial would be won. The knife and Jade’s possession of it would be immaterial. They’d walk into court next week and stroll out again without breaking a sweat.

And yet he suspected that Jade would not overlook this indiscretion. He suspected that, were he to play this situation to his legal advantage, he would never see Jade again. And he found that that contingency did not sit well with him.

(Surely he wouldn’t rather go to prison than stop fucking Jade Puget! Surely the detective was just another disposable piece of ass in a long line of men and women used like meat and then forgotten. But he wasn’t leading Smith to the dining room nonetheless.)

“Is this a bad time?” Smith asked in a voice that implied he didn’t think much of people who forgot their appointments, naked, a week before they went to trial.

“No, no, come in,” said Adam, swinging open the door. “Though be advised, I’m not wearing pants.”

 

 

He showed his lawyer to the library before excusing himself for reasons of indecency. He did not trust Smith to stay put for very long, so he ran back to the dining room without dignity. He couldn’t recall when he’d last run nude through his home; probably not since he’d terrorized the household staff as a bathtime flight risk, decades ago.

By the time Adam skidded into the dining room he was out of breath and laughing like a child. “We may have to reschedule,” he managed to tell Jade, who had dressed and now gaped at Adam almost as if he were behaving like a madman. “Your brother’s here,” he explained, unable to stop himself laughing. The detective paled at the thought. “You might want to go.”

Puget didn’t need telling twice. He seized his briefcase and would have run out of the house without looking back, if Adam hadn’t blocked the doorway with six feet of nudity and an insane grin.

“Next week?” asked Adam.

“Excuse me?”

“Next week. Have dinner with me.” Adam touched Jade’s  
wrist lightly to accompany his entreaty.

To his credit, Jade looked taken aback only for a moment. “Yeah, all right,” he agreed quietly.

Adam kissed him briefly on the mouth before he let Jade go. Though he didn’t have the time to spare he stood in the doorway like a fool, naked and beaming, watching the detective scurry away, a suspiciously rosy warmth spreading through his chest. As his reward he saw a small, private smile tug the corner of Jade’s eternal frown as he rounded the bend in the hallway and passed out of sight.

A wild surge of happiness coursed through Adam as he dressed himself. He wanted to laugh out loud, so he did. There was an unmistakable spring in his step as he jogged back to the library, wearing a grin he would not be able to explain, mooning over the parting brush of lips that had been so much more intimate than everything that had passed before. He said _yes_. Jade _liked_ him.

He should make a habit of being tried for murder, Adam reflected. It had done wonders for his social life. And—he couldn’t remember ever being happier.

 

* * *

 

"I believe this is yours.” The gravelly voice of a goon. Where was he? Swollen lids parted to admit a sliver of searing light. A nudge in the ribs from a boot. On the ground, then. A cool, pale floor somewhere. And alive. Alive was better than he’d expected.

“Oh, honey.” A light touch on his forehead. A voice like silk. “What did you do to him? Who sent you here?”

Receding footsteps down a corridor. No answer. A woman’s sigh. “Well now what am I supposed to do with you,” she muttered to herself. At that, he roused himself, as best he was able. His body might be broken, but far be it from him to inconvenience a dame.

“L—L’nore?” he grunted, squinting at the blurry outline that hovered over him. He tested his arm to see if it would take his weight and raised himself up on it. He figured he could about drag himself to wherever she needed him, though there were no guarantee the effort wouldn’t make him vomit.

“I’m here, sugar,” she said, in a voice that made it sound like she wished she wasn’t. With her help, Hunter made it into her apartment and onto the couch. She brought ice for his most visible injuries, a wet washcloth for his face, water that she tilted carefully between his lips. Under her less-than-tender ministrations Hunter returned to himself in bits and flashes: his vision, his ability to sit upright, the capacity to drink water without slopping it down his front.

Lenore Cotreau sat on an ottoman across from the couch, keeping her distance. His nose, which felt pretty well obliterated, spared him from smelling himself, but by the sheer quantity of dried sick on him he imagined it wasn’t the highlight of his company. “So are we gonna talk about what the hell happened to you?”

“I asked the wrong questions,” he said, parroting her long-ago warning to him. He tried out a roguish grin but it made his whole face throb beneath the ice.

Lenore did not look amused by his wordplay. She was in her daytime businesswoman skin, in which she didn’t seem to find Hunter nearly so amusing. In fact he rather suspected the night they’d spent together was edging closer and closer to Lenore’s ‘mistake’ category. Terribly inconsiderate of his unconscious battered body to be dropped on her stoop.

“You look like you need a hospital,” Lenore said coolly. “Your nose…” She trailed off, wincing.

Hunter could feel it. He did not require a description. “I don’t think I’ll be as pretty as I used to be,” he told Lenore, showing his teeth. He was short a few.

She wasn’t interested in trading quips, however. She looked very much as if she wanted him out of her house and didn’t much care about anything else.

“Look,” he said soberly. “I don’t know what you’re involved in, but your boyfriend is not a good man. I don’t know how safe you are. He dropped me off here for a reason—to send a message. Maybe it was just to scare you. Or maybe he’s telling you you’re next.”

Lenore’s face blanked out with confusion. “What are you talking about?” she asked sharply. She was beginning to sound frightened.

“He killed that girl, Lenore. And I’m lucky he didn’t do the same to me.”

Lenore stood abruptly. Her face was white. “Is this some kind of sick joke? It isn’t _funny_. I barely _know_ you. You can’t just come in here and—”

“You’re the one who warned me about him,” Hunter interrupted calmly. The one part of this case his prior work had prepared him for was hysterical dames. Shrill harpies were a long-standing institution around his office.

“Warned you?” Lenore’s fear, just like that, had turned to outrage. “I _warned_ you not to go around asking stupid questions because they’re looking for that girl’s killer, aren’t they? Like frantically searching for any suspect at _all_. And for some reason I didn’t want it to be you. He’s a _lawyer_ , for god’s sake. Working on that big goddamn murder trial. Now I don’t know why you think you can just walk in here and—”

“I was dragged here unconscious,” Hunter pointed out. (Reasonably, he thought.) “So all I’m saying is maybe you should think about your own safety for a minute.”

“I’m thinking about how you’re crazy and dangerous and got me involved in whatever sick shit this is! I’m thinking it’s best for _my_ safety if you get your unstable ass out of my living room and never come back!”

Hunter was starting to think the same thing. “Lawyer, you said?”

“I’m a paralegal,” Lenore was saying with exasperation and disgust. “We _work_ together. I think you should leave. Now. Go to a hospital or just—or just anywhere else.”

_No wonder he looked so familiar._

“You aren’t safe, Lenore. Your boyfriend—”

“I want you to leave!” Lenore’s yell, in that powerful, throaty voice, filled the room and silenced him. He didn’t like that, didn’t like it when he scared a dame to screaming. He must look rougher than he thought. He had a feeling in his gut like he’d swallowed lead, a stomach-twisting certainty that if he left the dame here alone she’d turn up dead—that he’d find her in the living room. And the hallway. And the bedroom. And the bathtub. That he’d find her smeared all over this place.

But he’d felt that way ever since Wynn was killed. Forcing his company on Lenore Cotreau wouldn’t save any lives. Going to the police with what he knew would. It was the advice he should have given Wynn Wednesday, and it was advice he should take now.

“Thank you,” he said as sincerely as he was able, getting to his feet. He wasn’t entirely sure he could stand without falling even as he stood. “Be careful for me, okay?”

She started at him distrustfully as he shuffled over to the door. “You won’t see me again,” he paused to say before leaving. She shut and bolted the door behind him. _Good girl_ , he thought, hoping he wouldn’t see _her_ again, either. Hoping this wasn’t another dame he walked out on who turned up dead.

 

* * *

 

"What are you so happy about?” Smith asked as Adam all but skipped back into the library. He had tried: he couldn’t wipe the stupid grin off his face.

The lawyer did it for him. Smith turned to face Adam, face composed in a mask of cool amusement. He held a saber in his hand—Adam’s great-grandfather’s, from a long-ago war. Smith had taken it from the wall above the fireplace where it was displayed. Smith studied it with interest, running a finger down the blade. Adam’s skin prickled.

“The trial,” Adam said after a beat, trying to regain the composure his moony grin had cost him. “I would have thought our impending victory was a credit to us both. But maybe you’d prefer I went to prison?” He hovered foolishly in the doorway, legs unwilling to bring him any closer to his attorney.

Smith’s mouth twisted into a sepulchral smile. “I don’t doubt it would be a boon to society if you did,” he said softly, turning the long blade over and over in his hands. “But I’m in the business of keeping men like you on the streets. I stopped being squeamish about that a long time ago. I will admit I had hoped that a high-profile case like this would be more… interesting, however.”

Adam could, in fact, emphasize on this point. He knew what it was like to have one’s talents utterly wasted. To chase crazy, reckless thrills, because if the risk was great enough, it might even stir your heart to beat. Hadn’t he earlier this very evening tried to incite a man to shoot him in the chest? To kill him? Because laying there dying, beating out his blood in Jade’s arms, in that moment he might finally feel alive?

But then, the rules had changed, hadn’t they? He’d asked Jade to come back and have dinner with him next week, and Jade—he’d said yes. It wasn’t a move. It wasn’t a game. It was a legitimate invitation. Even he didn’t know what his angle was yet. Maybe his endgame really was rehabilitation.

So yes. Adam could emphasize. He’d been hoping for a challenge in the courtroom himself, at the beginning. Something to get the blood pumping, something he had to _work_ a little for, for once in his life. Wasn’t that part of the reason he hadn’t led Smith straight into the dining room? Why he hadn’t let the Marchand kid go ahead and make the front page with his photographs? Because doing it that way would be too _easy_?

“I could always show up drenched in fresh blood,” Adam volunteered, although he regretted his word choice immediately, unable to take his eyes off the saber set so unnervingly in Smith’s hands. His smile now was all teeth, the giddy warmth Jade had imparted ebbing away, leaving him himself again. He was no stranger to thrill-seeking, true: but he wasn’t paying the lawyer a thousand dollars an hour to pout about Adam _not_ going to prison. He did in fact have a bit of a stake in the verdict, himself.

Smith matched his empty smile tooth for tooth. “How does it feel, to have gotten away with murder?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Adam parried. “Trial’s not til next week.”

Smith held his gaze in eyes as cold, challenging, full of something inscrutable. After a beat he laughed, backing down. Adam contributed a joyless chuckle of his own. He couldn’t shake the feeling that control of the situation was slipping away. Why was Smith still holding his great-grandfather’s sword?

As if sensing the tension that had knotted through Adam’s shoulders and back, Smith spoke in a tone that could almost have been mistaken for pleasant. “We still have quite a bit of material to go over before we’re ready for trial. I’d like to see what you’re wearing Tuesday, I want to run my opening remarks past you, and I want to practice facial expressions, demeanor, and fielding questions from the prosecution and the press. You’re obviously adept at controlling your affect,” and here he gave a wry little smile that rubbed Adam the exact wrong way, “but we’ll want this to go more like the Wednesday memorial than your interviews with my brother. The jury needs to see some pain and passion, not your impression of an iceberg.”

“There are more things in Heaven and earth, Horatio,” Adam murmured, pursing his lips with amusement at all the things Smith Puget didn’t know. Pain and passion indeed.

Edging so close to the truth was a mistake.

Smith’s eyes narrowed. The great rift of mistrust between them was a physical sensation, creeping along beneath his skin, making him squirm. There was something unsettled about the lawyer, something just slightly wrong—like a mouth that was an inch lower on the left than the right, or eyes that blinked at just slightly different speeds, or a Great War-era officer’s saber that he was attending to with far too much interest. Whatever it was, Adam was torn between the uncharacteristic urge to back away and to poke at it with a stick. Torn between the uneasy feeling that his life was in danger and the sick lurching thrill of putting himself at stake.

Smith tested the point of the blade with his finger and pulled back a bright bead of red. “If there’s something you’re not telling me…”

Saber aside, the lawyer didn’t scare him, Adam decided. He was the thing that haunted this house, after all. He was the thing that went bump in the night. He was the monster under the bed and the beast in the darkness, the slavering jaws hovering over pale blue necks. It took a bolder man than he was betting Smith Puget was to come into his house and start rattling chains. It was almost cute, that Smith was trying to threaten him, trying to seem dangerous. Didn’t he know he was lost in the woods? It would take more than a woodsman’s axe to split open this wolf.

“You’re the expert,” Adam said merrily, using the force of his bravado to propel him into the room. He dropped himself unceremoniously in an armchair, ignoring the feeling in his stomach like a panicked bird beating itself against the walls, trying to escape. “You tell me.”

The lawyer grinned, showing alarmingly wolfish teeth of his own. Adam regretted that he’d sat down. He’d thought the gesture would be cavalier and show he wasn’t afraid of anyone. Instead it made him feel small and defenseless, like he’d shown Smith his belly and let the lawyer’s muzzle close around the paper-thin fragility of his throat.

“There’s no one who’d rather see you serve a life sentence than me,” the lawyer said in a voice like champagne. “You think you’re the most dangerous person in this room? You think you’re the one with all the cards? No one’s untouchable.”

“Oh, well done,” Adam said, applauding slowly. He puffed out his feathers and tried to look big. The lawyer stood over him with a three-foot blade. Adam’s mouth was dry. “For a moment there I almost felt threatened.”

Smith’s eyes flashed with quick, coiling anger. He didn’t look so like his brother now. Jade’s anger was methodical, followed logical principles of cause and effect. Once roused, it burned with slow heat, powerful but quiet. Controlled. Smith’s eyes showed a wildfire of rash animal loathing, a kind of madness, anger that was as likely to burn everything to ash as it was his enemies. Adam was familiar with the concept. He knew how good it felt to slip into that kind of rage.

“One word in my brother’s ear, Carson, and they’ll lock you up for life. I believe there is a knife that is of particular interest to him. The Wednesday job was rather sloppier than the first one, wasn’t it? You let pleasure get involved. You made a mess of it.” At the word ‘knife’ Adam’s chest had begun to throb with a new kind of fear, fear far removed from the oblique threat of the saber. There was after all a certain incriminating knife that came to mind. A missing one. A card that in all of this that was yet unplayed—a card he didn’t hold, anymore.  
Had he been so wrong? Had he miscalculated so badly?

The lawyer’s lips were an inch from his ear, his voice hardly more than a whisper. “ _I have the bloody knife you plunged into Wynn Wednesday_.”

Smith straightened up and smiled sweetly. He dropped the saber with a clatter to the floor, and held his hands up, palms open, facing Adam. “It’s not too late to submit new evidence, remember,” he said mildly. He turned and walked to the door. At the last moment he looked back and grinned dangerously at Adam, wilting in his chair, body wracked with chills and cold sweat even though he sat before a fire. “If I really wanted a challenge, Mr. Carson? I’d make one.”

 

* * *

 

Jade Puget drove himself home and buried the knife in his backyard.

Carson had left him alone in the manor not once, but twice. The first time—when the doorbell rang—Puget had produced the knife from the briefcase and run out into the hall, looking for a place to stash it. He’d darted in and out of no fewer than three rooms before, panicked, he had chosen an empty porcelain urn as the best possible solution and run back to the dining room. It wasn’t until he got there that he realized he was still holding it. The knife. He’d passed dozens of hiding places and hadn’t left the telltale heart in any one of them. He returned the knife to his briefcase and dressed methodically, reasoning through it. It made no sense to hide the knife _in_ the manor, did it? Not when he couldn’t get a warrant to get back in there to save his life. Not after his conversation with the Chief.

The grounds offered more opportunities. He had an informant or two he could get to make an anonymous tip—to say they’d seen someone burying something in the yard in the dead of night. Do the concerned neighbor bit. They’d bring in dogs. Jade wouldn’t bury it deep. The dogs would turn it up in no time. If he could just get out onto the grounds, he could stash it in the soft soil of the garden, a flowerbed, a hedge.

And then Carson had run back into the room, red-faced and naked and laughing, and had as good as told Jade he had unsupervised access to the whole of the estate for as long as his meeting with Smith ran. (And kissed Jade softly on the mouth. Looked into his eyes, all hope and happiness. All manipulation and sweet, sweet lies.)

Faced with this opportunity—this godsend—this perfect golden window in which to restore his reputation, salvage his evidence, and put Carson behind bars for good—faced with this miraculous, divine intervention, what did he do?

He very calmly gathered up his briefcase and his overcoat, drove directly home, took the knife out back and laid it in the earth.

He knelt on the grass, parting the cold, hard dirt with his hands. Winter drew near and the earth resisted. Using his fingernails, Jade tore up chunks of it, stubborn cold handfuls. The chill spread into his fingertips; they began to ache. The tender skin under his fingernails tore and bled, the rents filling up with dirt. He clawed at the earth with a mechanical rhythm, determined, unflinching. His fingernails cracked and his hands burned from the chill stored in the nighttime earth, and still he dug.

When the hole was big enough, he unlatched his briefcase with ragged hands. His heart rate had no so much as raised one beat. His breath fogged evenly in the night air. He was thinking clearly. It felt good. The chill of the earth felt good. The cool air on his skin felt good. His nerves quivered and lit up beneath his skin. He felt alive.

He felt in control of his life.

He laid the knife in the hole he’d dug and surveyed it for only a moment in the moonlight. It wasn’t a question of right thing or wrong thing, solutions or sacrifices. It was what it was.

He dug a hole in the ground and he filled it in again. When it was done, he went inside and lay down on his bed, shedding dirt. He crossed his hands, streaked black and red, over his stomach. He watched the passage of shadows across the ceiling in the dark, head empty, slowly slipping into a long and dreamless sleep.  


End Notes:

What are your guys' slash songs? For the last 9 or so years of my life I've always had a slash playlist in my iTunes. What do you like to write to? Read to? I have a song that basically wrote next week's chapter and gives me some sweet 90s feels, which I'll be sharing. So let me know what you listen to! I'm curious! Anyway, thanks for reading, as always!

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.afislash.com/viewstory.php?sid=8874>  



	13. Utmost Certainty

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all! Thanks for coming!
> 
> The song that wrote this chapter for me is "Let Me Go" by 3 Doors Down. Oh, the 90s. Anyway, for the Adam and Jade scene in here, I feel like I could have made my point much better if I'd just pasted in the song lyrics. So listen to it while you're reading if that's a thing you like to do! God knows I've listened to it 200 times in the last 3 days.
> 
> As always, I love and appreciate you guys for reading. I remember the glory days of this AFIslash, when I'd get pumped for awards season every year and try to wrap up my ongoing stories in time. I remember when I could barely finish one fic before I started the next, and I'd sometimes post more than one chapter a day and be inundated with reviews after every update! (What was high school but 8 hours a day of writing fanfic? The good old days!) I love this site and I'm happy to still be here keeping it alive with you guys.
> 
> I don't own the boys and this never happened.

"I need to speak with Detective Puget.”

The woman at the dispatch desk eyed Burgan like he’d just crawled out of a Dumpster. In his experience, women at dispatch desks generally did this, as they spent their days staring down suspects and thugs with jangling silver bracelets, fending off press inquiries, braving the labyrinthine file room, and being talked down to by beat cops. They held ultimate power over visitor’s passes and guarded them fiercely. They also generally made note of who was and wasn’t forcibly escorted from the premises, which often put Hunter at an immediate disadvantage. They were gatekeepers, door wardens. They were never in good moods.

If he’d had more time to plan, while accidentally busting this whole case open, he’d have brought coffee or a muffin—some kind of peace offering/small bribe to pave the way for his not inconsiderable charm. The bloodstained bowling shirt and bruised face were not going to open any doors for him.

“You think you’re the only one?” the gatekeeper asked him, frowning. She was an older Caucasian woman, grey-haired and large-busted, giving off a Nurse Ratched kind of vibe. Burgan didn’t have time for such a formidable foe. There was a murderer on the loose, looking for him, looking for Lenore, maybe. And not to get all Batman about it, but Hunter was the only one who could stop him.

“I have information about the Wednesday murder,” Hunter told her, as calmly as he was able. “Now please, I need to see the detective.”

The gatekeeper responded with a slow blink. “You’re that PI, aren’t you? Didn’t recognize you at first—you get in a fight with a flight of stairs?” Hunter opened his mouth to spout an unconvincing lie and she dismissed him with the wave of her lacquered hand. “Listen, buddy, unless you’re here to confess, you’re not getting past this desk.” Hunter opened his mouth once again and the door warden’s eyebrows dropped into a severe bar across her forehead. “Them’s the rules,” she rumbled menacingly.

It was all Hunter could do not to scream. “All right, all right, fine. I’m going,” he said, and turned away from the desk. He took another step and kept turning, coming all the way back around, and made a mad dash past the desk and into the precinct, coat billowing out behind him (not unlike a cape). The gatekeeper jumped to her feet and starting shouting after him but Hunter shouted louder: “I KNOW WHO KILLED WYNN WEDNESDAY!” he bellowed at the top of his lungs, tearing down the corridor past slack-jawed officers, bracing his body for the crunching impact of the inevitable tackle to the floor. “I KNOW WHO KILLED—”

Burgan rounded a corner and collided with a young female detective. They both fell backwards to the ground, her bundle of files and mug of coffee flying into the air and coming down around and on them. For a moment, Burgan stayed down, letting the cool linoleum chart the aches and inches of him. Then the detective he’d toppled let out a soft cry and he heaved his resistant weight into a sitting position.

The detective had chin-length brown hair and a plain, serious face; her large blue-green eyes were wide with dismay. She was looking at the coffee stains all over her white blouse. It had been a smart outfit, prior to the collision. Hunter recognized that she was young and feminine enough that the professionalism of her dress was one of the few avenues through which she was allowed to assert competence and composure, through which she could demonstrate her authority and rank. It wasn’t just her blouse; her crisp suit jacket, formerly a cool, pleasant grey, was now dappled with brown puddles. It may as well have been a physical assault on her person; it was damaging enough.

“I’m so sorry,” Hunter told her, helplessly. Her big eyes, somewhat watery, locked onto him critically. Hunter suddenly recognized her—she was the one who had warned him away from Wynn’s apartment, who had dropped strongly-worded hints about certain articles missing from the crime scene. She had done him a favor that day.

Well, today he could repay her.

“You’re the PI,” the detective said accusingly, getting carefully to her feet. Hunter gathered up the files she had dropped, many of which were now hopelessly coffee-soaked, and offered them to her uselessly. She just stared at them; they dripped conspicuously on the floor.

“Hunter Burgan,” he said, and swept into a cheery bow that his stiff, complaining body wasn’t thrilled with. “At your service. And you are…?”

“Detective Carey,” she said guardedly. “What were you shouting a moment ago? About the Wednesday murder?”

“Oh, that,” Hunter said, wheels turning. The information he had was… sensitive. Not for just any cop; Detective Puget should hear it first. He knew that. And yet… and yet Puget wasn’t exactly Hunter’s biggest fan, was he? Their last meeting had ended on a rather bad note, as he recalled. He wasn’t one for pettiness, generally; but wasn’t Detective Carey his only path past the front desk that didn’t terminate in a holding cell?

He decided quickly. Personal allegiances aside, lives were at risk. There was a killer on the loose and Hunter was the only one who could stop him. “I was saying that I know who killed her,” he said.

Detective Carey’s eyes widened. The coffee stains were instantly forgotten. Without another word she grabbed him by the coat sleeve and pulled him away from the gawping bullpen and down the hall, into an empty office. The name plate on the desk read _Chief Greg Suhr_.

“Sit,” Carey ordered, dropping the blinds on the windows that overlooked the bullpen. Feeling a bit like himself, Hunter dropped into the padded executive chair behind the desk instead of the cheaper, less comfortable one in front of it. When the detective turned back towards him she scowled at his choice.

“It’s not your chair either,” he told her.

“Enough!” Carey snapped, betraying a brittleness he hadn’t anticipated. He’d only been trying to… what? Lighten the mood? Lighten his conscience? People were being killed and he was fucking around with chairs. “Tell me what you know or get out.”

Suddenly he could feel every hurt again, every bruised inch of his skin, and the terrible aching sadness that hadn’t healed, might never heal, that had opened up inside him when he held beautiful dead Wynn Wednesday in his arms. “Yeah,” he said quietly, abashed, fatigued. If he looked rough, he felt rougher. He brought a careful, tender hand to his nose, which clung to his face like a pulped fruit. It was too late for the hospital. He was beyond clean white shoes and needlefuls of relief. “It was the lawyer—Carson’s lawyer.”

“Smith Puget?” Carey barked sharply. Hunter winced as if responding to a physical pain. He hadn’t wanted to say the name. “As in, Jade Puget’s brother?”

“The very same,” he said around a mouthful of regret.

Detective Carey just stared at him. “His own lawyer,” she repeated. “Why would he want to do that?”

As if it were his job to explain the motives of madmen. That was her business. He’d done his part.

Yet he knew she wouldn’t believe him, not without proof. He wished he had proof. “Well, while pummeling me for asking a very similar question, he mentioned—wanting a challenge. Apparently you lot have made this case too easy for him, in the courtroom. There was some name-calling. Puget said it should’ve been an open-and-shut case, that he should’ve had to fight tooth and nail to get Carson off the hook. And since he didn’t, he killed Wynn.” The words weighed heavy on him. His weary heart. “He killed Wynn to make it more interesting for himself, as he set a murderer free.”

Carey held up her hand, stopping him. “So he told you—Adam Carson’s _lawyer_ told you Carson was guilty? You didn’t happen to record this conversation in any way, did you?”

Her incredulity was more than he could bear. “Do you think I did this to myself?” he demanded, gesturing to the more visibly ghastly of his injuries, like the burst purple fruit that had once been his nose. “With all due respect, I’m not asking you to take my word for it, Detective. I’m asking you to—you know— _detect_. Check his house, his alibi. You’ll find something. I think… I think he’ll have kept a trophy.”

Carey, biting her lip, appeared deep in thought. She stared at him without seeming to see. He didn’t have time for her to be conflicted. Lenore didn’t have time for her to be conflicted. “I’m lucky I got out alive!” exploded out of him, unbidden. “If you don’t stop him, the next one’s on you. The next girl they find torn to fucking shreds is _on you_ , okay?” He was shouting and not inclined to stop. “ _It won’t be my fault_!” he bellowed. He stopped to catch his breath, panting, in time to see a hot flush of shame spread across Carey’s cheeks.

“Of course,” she said. He wondered if she was thinking about how he’d looked when they found him, when they arrived on the scene. The way Wynn had lain in his arms broken and bloody and dead and he hadn’t been able to do anything but weep. He wondered if she was remembering what she’d done, the small slop of vomit in the hall. He wondered if she was realizing what it would feel like, knowing that something like that happened because of you. That you could’ve prevented it.

 _Forty-seven times_.

“Wait here just one moment,” Carey said softly, ducking out of the office. He watched through the open door as she took command of the bullpen, shouting orders and mobilizing the troops. A flurry of activity awoke in response to her cries. In moments, two pairs of well-armed, vested officers and a forensics team were en route to Smith Puget’s listed address.

When she returned, she was holding two cardboard cups of coffee. The one she offered him smelled strongly of spirits. “There’s whiskey in this,” he said.

“You looked like you needed it.” Hunter knew it was the closest to an apology he’d get. He took the mug.

“Can I speak with Detective Puget now?” he asked quietly. Now that his part was over, now that he’d done everything in his power to put an end to the murder and bloodshed, he allowed himself to feel his hurt, his exhaustion. “This is something I would rather have discussed with him first.”

“Understandable,” Carey allowed. There was a peculiar look on her face. “But I’m afraid not.”

Tension shot through Hunter’s body anew. She couldn’t arrest him. She couldn’t. After he’d done their jobs for them. After he’d caught the bad guy. She couldn’t possibly. “Why not?” he croaked against the rising tide of panic in his throat. His hand twitched towards the empty space where he usually wore his gun.

Carey pulled her lips into a tight, regretful smile. “He stepped down this morning. Detective Puget resigned.”  
She was right about the whiskey; he did need it. Hunter downed the scalding contents of his cup at a gulp. “What about the Carson murder?” he asked when he was able.

Carey took a large sip from her own coffee. “I expect he’ll get away with it, won’t he? We’ve got nothing on him. There’s nothing we can do.”

Hunter shook his head numbly, regretting the emptiness of his cup already. “Son a bitch,” he said quietly.

Detective Carey got to her feet. “Let me grab a first aid kit and I’ll patch you up. The chief’s going to want to debrief you.”

But Hunter shook his head, standing. It wasn’t a game, what he did. It wasn’t a pastime. It wasn’t a joke. It wasn’t something he could pick up and put down as he pleased. Once started, it was something he could not stop. He was part of this now.

“Not this time,” he said, leaving behind the drink and the dame both.

Carson was going to get away with it, this time. He understood that. He had been sloppy, distracted from his purpose, misled and then obsessed by the death of Wynn Wednesday. The police couldn’t be counted on to follow up every lead, turn every stone, entertain and pursue the stranger theories: the limit of their state-funded abilities was the assumption that had created his line of work. Adam Carson was going to walk free, and part of the blame was his.

San Francisco was his city, his home. If her streets coursed with filth, he’d clean them up. If criminals walked free, hand-in-hand with smug, scurrilous lawyers, he’d put them back behind bars. Carson might get away with it this time, but it was the last time. Men like Carson could buy the police, could buy alibis, could stuff witnesses’ mouths with cash and bury their indiscretions under the weight of their bank accounts. But they couldn’t buy him. Hunter Burgan, private eye, could not be bought.

_As I walked from the room, my footsteps echoed through the bated silence that had settled over the bullpen like a blanket of fresh snow. I’d been made a fool of, not for the last time. I’d let a dame with a plea in her voice and a trembling white hand blow smoke in my eyes, lie to me. She got dead, fast. I was going to have to do better._

_I threw open the doors and stared out into the night. It was out there, hot and seamy, pulsing in the vivid California night. Right now, women were weeping, men were dying, drugs were surging like club music beats. There was no ivory tower or beacon of righteousness; crime had won._

_But things were about to change. I was going to fight back._

_I lit a cigarette with the last match from a Holiday Club matchbook, one of many the lounge singer had filled my pockets with. I took a deep drag and exhaled slowly, watching smoke from my lungs dissipate into the silence, swirling out to the horizon, the garish city lights, the squalor and sound that composed her, my lady, San Francisco._

_Then I followed it._

_Who am I? Not a knight in shining armor. Not a light in the darkness. Just a man who’s made as many mistakes and wrong choices as any bad guy out there._

_Who am I?_

_I’m Hunter Burgan, PI. And this city is_ mine.

 

* * *

 

**ADAM CARSON: INNOCENT**

_Yesterday morning, with a larger civilian audience than most televised courtroom dramas enjoy, Adam Carson was tried for the murder of his mother, Eliza Carson. To the surprise and consternation of many, the San Francisco Police Department chief among them, Carson was found innocent by a jury of his peers._

_The evidence presented against Carson was largely circumstantial and halfheartedly defended. The touching portrait of his grief and good works have clearly swayed public opinion in his favor, and Carson left the courthouse not in cuffs but as a folk hero, brave bearer of accusations in the face of his terrible losses._

_“He was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” reports Mrs. Alice Wednesday. “It’s clear to everyone that he’s a victim here. It’s vulgar that he had to stand trial with so little evidence.” Mrs. Wednesday is right on that count—the refrain of the day seems to be ‘what evidence?’._

_The evidence presented at the trial was purely incidental. Carson, found at the scene of the crime along with two others, had a sound motive: he inherited Eliza Carson’s considerable assets. His only alibi is the shaky claim that he was with Wynn Wednesday, a claim she denied up until her timely death. But without the murder weapon, the prosecution’s case crumbled. There was no way to link Carson, or any of the witnesses, to the crime._

_Speculation abounds surrounding the circumstances of the Carson murder. To date, no one has been sentenced with the crime. The much-publicized trial has drawn to a close; it is up to the readers to decide if justice has been served._

_A boon to the defense came unexpectedly yesterday morning, when Carson’s lead attorney, Smith Puget, was taken into police custody on suspicion of implication in the Wednesday murder. For further coverage of this late-breaking scandal, see above._

 

Davey Marchand once again looked up from his name in the paper and sighed. He knew he ought to be grateful for the assignment; his editor had made it abundantly clear that he didn’t want Davey getting anywhere near coverage of the trial. It was Carson himself who had insisted. He’d even chosen the headline, pulling his considerable weight with the Editor-in-Chief to bestow this final gift.

Accepting it—and what choice did he have?—made Davey feel like a scoundrel, like the journalist in Carson’s pocket that he’d been all along. But he’d have been a fool to pass up the opportunity to get his name on the front page one last time, now that he’d been relegated back to the _Society_ pages. Refusing might have cost him even that lackluster position. So he’d agreed to write the article, a short blurb for the first page below the headline story that had subsumed all interest in the Carson murder, especially given its disappointing ending. Crime stories aren’t much good when there’s no bad guy, when no one rots away in jail—when there’s no ending.

When it turns out to be just another cold case for the file drawer.

Meanwhile, on page 3, the most interesting interview he’d ever read was sitting plump and smug with somebody else’s byline. It was an exclusive interview with a private detective with delusions of Batman, the one who had tipped off the police about Smith Puget. A cursory search of the man’s home had uncovered not just a gummy, blood-caked knife but also the piano wire that had finally ended Wynn Wednesday’s suffering. The whole _Chronicle_ , the whole city, was abuzz with it. This final note in the long, murderous opera had guaranteed the verdict of Carson’s trial; going through the proceedings at all had only been cursory. Suddenly there were no aspersions left to cast on the version of Carson Davey himself had presented, the grieving philanthropist who made sick children and nurses cry, who commissioned the ethereal stone likeness of Wednesday (from a local artist, no less) and honored her with the memorial service of the year. Who in the history of time had ever hesitated to think badly of a lawyer?

It couldn’t have gone better if it had been planned.

 _If it had been planned_. Davey’s suspicions niggled and caught. His own work completed, he scanned the interview for the nth time, reviewing the tortured logic of the private eye, the increasingly preposterous series of events that read like a pulp novel and had led him to the conclusion that Smith Puget was the real killer. (Wynn Wednesday’s real killer, that is. Whoever had killed Eliza Carson had slipped away into obsolescence. There were brighter bloodstains, bigger headlines, fresher rumors. A woman had died and the city had ceased to care. They’d only cared in the first place because the Carson family was notably charismatic and rich. The sensational (well-publicized) arrest of Carson’s lawyer on the day of the trial was a flash grenade. The public had been blinded to the original crime—the unsolved crime. _It couldn’t have gone better if it had been planned_.)

The interview ended with the PI’s solemn, aggrandized vow to stalk the streets and oust the criminals, to weed out the evil and make the great city of San Francisco shine again. It read like a comic book monologue. Davey was having trouble believing that anyone had taken the man seriously, that upon hearing all this anyone in the police force at all would have said “Sounds reasonable, let’s check it out”.

But Davey had reasons to suspect the police force, too.

After he’d been shot at, after he’d been nearly killed—funny how some things you just don’t forget—he’d returned to the scene of the crime. Made courageous by daylight, he’d canvassed local businesses, hoping to turn up street-facing footage from a security camera that would reveal the identity of his assailant. It turned out there were two such cameras: one from a parking garage, the other an ATM. The bank had refused to let him review their footage, crisply dismissing him with the assertion that if any evidence of a shooting turned up on their tapes the police would be duly notified. The owner of the parking garage, a friendly Middle Eastern man who had watched at least as many police procedurals as Davey had, found the prospect scintillating. He and Davey combed the footage together, only to find that the camera feed had been disrupted, rendering five crucial minutes into nothing but static. It reeked of conspiracy—of money, power, influence. Of Carson.

There was one detail Carson had overlooked. Cocky, self-assured, he hadn’t bothered to hunt down the bullets. Davey found one embedded in a brick wall. He’d played the last card he had, the last tenuous connection: there was a girl in CSI he’d met at the annual policeman’s ball. There had been flirting; she’d said he was cute. Nothing had come of it; given the gravity and extent of the favor he’d begged from her, nothing ever would.

He fingered the plastic baggie in his pocket, holding the crumpled lead in the palm of his hand, imagining what such a solid little thing would have done to his insides, had it made its mark. After an extended bout of unattractive wheedling, vague threats, and truly pathetic answering machine begging, his crime scene girl had agreed to look bullet for him, on the condition that he’d leave her alone forever and stop leaving creepy voicemails if she did. She had identified it at a glance.

“Rimless pistol cartridge,” she had told him. “10x22 millimeter Smith & Wesson—that’s a forty cal. It won’t do you much good. It’s an old law enforcement cartridge. There are hundreds of .40 S & Ws in the Bay Area alone.” She had given it back to him with a look of distaste on her face.

“Could you get a fingerprint off it?” he’d asked.

“This isn’t TV,” she’d told him crisply. “No one loads magazines by hand. And you shouldn’t even be here.”

So that was that. It hadn’t mattered. Even when he’d checked the firearm registry database he, strictly speaking, should not have had access to, to peruse the long list of names of those who owned guns that would fire such a bullet, it hadn’t mattered. _Law enforcement cartridge_. On that list of names, only one had meant anything.

 _Head Detective Jade Puget, San Francisco Police Department_.

Logic and reason, evidence and cold hard proof, went out the window. There was no question in Davey’s mind whose gun those bullets had come from.

The worst part was how much sense it all made. The worst part was he’d been right all along. The cops were corrupt. Adam Carson had walked free because the man in charge of the investigation _wanted_ him to. Was the whole city in Carson’s pocket? The PI-turned-vigilante guy had been more right than he knew.

Davey didn’t know if Puget had truly wanted him dead, or if the shots had just been a warning. He did know Puget should have killed him while he had the chance. He skimmed through the interview one last time before punching the PI’s name into Google. _Hunter Burgan_. It quickly turned up a phone number, an address. Davey wrote the address down on his notepad. This was a conversation better had in person. Could he even trust the phones these days?

It was true that Jade Puget had resigned, that the Carson trial had been put to bed for good. But as long as men like Puget and Carson were out there, the city wasn’t safe. Men like Davey weren’t safe. But he was a journalist, a good one. His business was truth.

What kind of vigilante didn’t need a sidekick?

Davey pulled on his coat and walked out of the _Chronicle_ building for the last time. If they wouldn’t publish the truth, that was their business; but he wasn’t going to write any more lies. He checked the address on his notepad and slipped it into his pocket. Time to go out into the world and forge a new life, a new identity.

He was going to show Carson he didn’t own this city, or at least not all of it. He was going to go out there and wreak some havoc.

 

* * *

 

Adam felt giddy and reckless, like an incendiary balloon that had slipped its lead and now drifted, untethered, seeking something to brush up against and end. He believed in a constructivist experience; he believed that in this world, he made up the rules and the facts and the fictions. He believed he’d built this whole complicated affair with his own hands.

And in spite of all that, he believed it was real.

He stood on Detective Puget’s doorstep as a free man with nothing left to fear. His forehead beaded with sweat in the cold air and his hands trembled, his stomach swooping and his heart racing. He was terrified.

He rang the bell.

The man who opened the door just as Adam began to grow faint from holding his breath only resembled the detective. He was dressed simply, in jeans and a V-necked sweater so uncharacteristically fashionable it must have been a gift, with an unshaven face and rumpled, uncombed hair. He was taller than Adam had ever realized, standing for the first time as if the whole of the world were not on his back, and the distinctive circles under his eyes were not half as dark as usual. Stranger yet, he was smiling. The warmth of it reached his light brown eyes, a clear amber color with no flecks or fragments. His cheeks were round and full when he smiled; his teeth were slightly crooked. Adam did a quick visual scan of his shoulders, his hips; he was unarmed. He looked ten years younger. He looked like a different man.

Most importantly, he looked happy to see Adam.

Some of the peculiarly gripping terror, which Adam had failed to feel when his mother lay dead at his feet and he had failed to feel when he was handcuffed and hauled to the police station and he had failed to feel when he stood trial for murder with a lawyer he’d only met once before because his own had been just that morning arrested, abated. His head still spun and his stomach still quivered as if he stood on the edge of a precipice; but then, he supposed he did.

“If you’re here for dinner, I’m afraid I have to tell you it’s only quarter past ten,” Jade said, his voice warm and quick and, Adam believed, fond.

“Just extending you the same timeliness and courtesy you showed me,” Adam parried, raising his eyebrows. Jade stepped aside and let him into the foyer. Adam tried to restrain himself from too obviously craning his neck in his frantic desire to take in every inch of Jade’s home. He’d never been there before. It was rather smaller and shabbier than he’d expected—darker, too. But he found he liked it. It was big enough to fit you and small enough to hold you; it wasn’t anything like the manor. It was cozier, filled with worn things that _belonged_ to someone, things that someone actually used. It was—and Adam was aware of the cheesy quality of his own thoughts—a home.

Jade seemed to become aware of the smallness and shabbiness of his home at the same time Adam did. He closed the door behind Adam in an attempt to hide the flush that had spread across his cheeks. “I haven’t spent much time at home lately,” he said, squinting up at the ceiling light fixture, which was extremely dusty and appeared to have only one of four bulbs in it. “And by ‘lately’ I mean in the last ten years or so.” He gave an apologetic half-smile. “Interior decorating and upkeep keep getting pushed back, somehow… I expect I’ll have time for it now.”

Adam could imagine it: Jade coming back to this place only to sleep, brew coffee, and occasionally eat. The grand plans of the homebuyer fizzling out in the shadow of the harried detective. He expected there would still be a few unpacked moving boxes in the garage. The thought made him smile unexpectedly.

“I read about that in the paper,” Adam said. He’d looked for Jade in the courtroom; he’d been looking forward to watching the detective grow ever surlier and more flustered as the case he’d barely cobbled together fell apart. But he’d also been quite glad when the detective hadn’t shown up. There was the matter of the knife, and of the defamatory uses they’d put their bodies to. These things would have lain between them, thick and sparking, and the tensions and desperation of the trial might have dredged them up. Disrupted the balance, their tenuous peace. Ruined everything.

“I like it, by the way. The house,” he added. Jade raised his eyebrows, looking for the lie in Adam’s words, finding none. “My own is… full of ghosts.” It was true: he’d been one of them. He’d haunted that manor his whole life, alongside his father… his mother. He didn’t like anymore the man he was supposed to be. He wanted to try being tangible, being touched. The only good memories the manor held were of Jade, the violent, scalding ways they’d used each other in those cold, echoing rooms, the way their bodies had burned together, needing and degrading and shaming one another to the brink of love, terror, release.

Adam had woken this morning surprised to find he didn’t want those memories, either. He didn’t want to use Jade and cast him aside. He didn’t want to be the edges Jade cut himself open upon. Instead he wanted to lie in heavy-breathing silence and blue-black stillness, outlined by the moon on the ballroom floor, hands brushing, legs touching. He didn’t want to have and be had; he wanted to _be with_.

He didn’t want Jade to leave, after. He didn’t want Jade to leave at all.

It was not something he could remember ever experiencing before.

Jade rocked slightly on his heels. His cheeks still glowed with quiet embarrassment and, unless Adam was quite mistaken, pleasure at the unexpected visit, but it was clear he didn’t know what to say. The silence between them was straining, awkward. It was unusual for them to have any kind of conversation, particularly an honest one, antecedent to fucking. Neither of them knew how to do this, to stand clothed in a foyer and neither shout nor fuck.

“Would you like… coffee?” Jade asked awkwardly, making a move in the direction of what Adam assumed was the kitchen. Adam followed him, trying to work out what he wanted to say so he’d sound cool, desirable. The trial was over; their stalemate was done. Now was the moment of breaking, of either drifting apart or crashing together. Nothing held them in place anymore. Nothing held them in orbit around each other. Why had he assumed Jade would want to see him today? Why had he assumed what they had was anything more than murder and mayhem? Adam was, legally speaking, innocent; Jade wasn’t a lawman anymore. What did they have left, divorced of the terminal chemistry, the toxic seduction of cat and mouse?

What if Jade didn’t want him?

Adam spoke in a rush, clumsy and the opposite of suave, before he could think anymore and make himself vomit. “I’d like to stay here with you,” he blurted. “I’d like to… to stay.”

To his credit, Jade did not laugh out loud. “On the run from the law again already?” he asked lightly. His face betrayed little, though his brows had come together at Adam’s declaration.

 _I want to get to know you_ , Adam thought of saying. _I want to spend time with you. Eat meals together, have conversations, threaten one another with guns strictly as foreplay_ , he could say. _I want to fall asleep to the sound of your breathing._ Or _I’ve never felt this way before_. Or _I’ve never felt_. Or _I want to have a real life_.

Or _I want it to be with you_.

All of these thoughts rushed to his tongue at once. What he said was, “My butler.” He smiled wryly. “We’re having trust issues.”

Whatever was churning behind Jade’s eyes clicked into place. His brow relaxed, and he smiled the wider before turning away, almost shyly, to pour coffee into two chipped mugs. He’d made up his mind, knew what he was going to say. Adam’s stomach dropped again and he did the best he could to brace himself; silly, desperate hope made it difficult. He couldn’t help himself. Madly, stupidly, tremendously, he believed.

“It’s a bit smaller than you’re used to,” Jade said primly, adding sugar to both coffees without asking Adam’s preference, a quality that would have been annoying in anyone else. “And I have a cat,” he added, turning around to hand Adam one of the mugs.

“I like cats,” Adam said, letting it hang between them. Jade’s smile parted, showing a flash of teeth, veering into an uncontrolled grin for a bare moment before he brought it back under control, biting his lip. Adam let himself grin, too.

“I guess it’s settled then,” said Jade, smiling shyly into the still black surface of his coffee.

Adam could have yelped for joy. It felt like madness, happiness did. “Put down your coffee,” he said suddenly, setting down his own. Jade just looked at him. “Put it down,” he said again, “or I’m going to spill it everywhere.”

The moment Jade’s mug made contact with the counter, Adam was on him. Adam pressed Jade up against the counter and the cabinets with the force of his body, his embrace. He seized Jade’s hip in one hand, Jade’s jaw in the other, and kissed him deeply, deliberately, slowly. His tongue explored Jade’s mouth purposefully, plying secrets, knowing, claiming. Jade didn’t passively receive the exploration; he responded in kind, pushing back, knowing and owning for himself.

When they broke apart Adam was breathing hard, feeling like a teenager, feeling like he could fuck for hours and never get enough. But there would be time for that. Instead, with a happy sigh, he leaned back against the counter next to Jade and reached for his coffee again. Jade slipped his fingers, curiously scabbed, into Adam’s own and their hands rested between them, a silent testament to the magnitude of what they’d agreed.

 _I am yours and you are mine_ , their hands, so casually held, said. The intimacy, the vulnerability, of such a simple gesture was staggering. Jade’s thin skin brushed against the bones of Adam’s wrist, its pronounced veins raising goosebumps with their passage. _Whoever you are and whoever I am. Whoever we turn out to be. For better, and for worse._

Adam squeezed Jade’s fingers and bit his tongue on the well of affection he felt, the things that would be damaged by exposure to air. He could love and not name it. Silver tongues oxidized too, as surely as the cutlery. For now it was enough to be, to do. Words would come later.

Instead, he spoke casually, reverting to his irritating nature, trying to make Jade prickle or laugh. “So it turns out your brother’s a murderer,” he remarked, as if it were a minor headline he’d glanced at in a magazine. “Did I tell you he threatened my life the other night?”

“You poor thing,” Jade murmured back, sipping his coffee and smiling. Like Adam, he was far away from the words they were speaking, tangled up in the points all along their sides where bodies touched. “Thank heavens you survived.”

“Yes, it was all very traumatizing,” Adam prattled on melodramatically, not paying any more attention to his words than Jade was. They were exchanged meaninglessly, on the surface. The real conversation was carried on in heartbeats. Adam continued to speak, and Jade continued to riposte. Their hearts continued to beat.

Smiling, speaking softly, they drank their coffee on a Wednesday morning, warding off the winter’s chill. Sunlight streamed in through the sliding glass doors, pulling out the blond highlights in the wooden cabinets, making the checked curtains above the sink glow with warmth, lighting up the dingy kitchen and making it look far grander than first glance had done.

Together, without so many words, they formed a contract between them. They agreed to believe this was real.

 

* * *

 

It was a beautiful apartment. One of those historic Mission District buildings, retrofitted into stylish lofts. The gaping windows, hung with ephemeral curtains, allowed passersby every opportunity to catch him in the act. The knowledge of this could always be counted upon to enhance the thrill.

He stood above the body, where it lay cooling, spreading its stain across the rug. Hours yet til the sun would rise, but he thought he’d stay and greet the dawn with her, his handiwork. He loved the way pale pink morning light fell across fresh bloodstains. He didn’t like to think of himself as a killer; he preferred to think of it as a kind of art, his higher purpose, his true calling.

He knelt to stroke her hair, cut short and boyish to her head. She had been irresistible, a shimmering temptress with a voice that had swallowed him whole, caressing from every direction, buttering every angle of his self until it turned to gold. He had melted into her, sweet and shining, at first sight. From the moment she parted her lips he knew he couldn’t rest until he’d heard her scream.

He had been patient. So patient. Each woman was her own sort of temple, however regrettably made of meat. Each woman called for her own sort of worship. Her own kind of death. This one he had shot up with light as sweet as the coming sunrise, folded her into softness and smooth halcyon happy, and parted her skin like silk, spilling open what was inside. Her life rushed out these new seams, gushed out of her arms in a hurry to get away all at once; now it trickled, her heart having beat its last. All that was left was gravity.

She’d been so surprised. Her lips parted easy as her skin, her final exhalation a soft “ _oh_ ”. None of them ever saw it coming. Everybody thought she was immortal.

He breathed in the smell of her, better than the heroin. They’d find this body too, and he wondered what they’d make of it. He’d used a straight razor, old fashioned, as a gentleman might have. He left it folded into her hand, strong and copper-colored. She wasn’t so rosy now. Her lustrous skin turned to wax, going yellow. He left the syringe too. That would throw them for a loop. They’d had such trouble finding the other weapons. This time he’d leave all the pieces intact and see if they saw the puzzle.

He pressed his lips to her forehead, going cold. His skin prickled. Nobody was immortal, it was true. Nobody was invincible. But some, he believed, some had the power to rise above the writhing masses, to take life into their hands and shape it, to give and to take in broad, sweeping gestures and in the minutiae. Some had the power to become gods.

In a beautiful old apartment in the Mission District, life left the body of a lounge singer, everything that she ever was fading away. She had been magic, and now she turned back to meat. In a beautiful old apartment, her killer rose to his feet and smiled softly, knowing he would almost certainly get away with it.

End Notes:

THE END!

Yes, really.

I'm aware that the havoc line is cheesy as hell but I figured you'd forgive me. And before you cry 'cop-out', I'd like to say that this is the ending I'd planned from the start. It's not actually a matter of me writing myself into a corner, although that happened pretty much endlessly throughout this story. About 3 plot points turned out how I'd planned them, because I kept writing something more interesting and then having to figure out what to do with it. But my intention is right there in the title--almost certainly. I wanted everybody to be ALMOST certain, all along, of Adam's guilt. And I wanted you to have to walk away still wondering whodunit. (I actually think you could make a case for a number of killers--let me know who your best guess is, and I'll tell you mine.)

Thank you so much for sticking with me on this! You guys are some of the best and most supportive readers out there. So thank you for reading, as ever, and if you have the time and inclination, I'd love to hear what you think!

Thanks guys. See you next time.

  
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

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